How Corporations Must Embrace Extended Producer Responsibility

A colleague  recently visited Marietta, Georgia for her son’s baseball tournament only to feel, in her words, “despair and dismay” at the mounds of empty Gatorade bottles guzzled by her son’s team that couldn’t be recycled as there were no bins around the baseball diamonds. Determined not to landfill the dozens of bottles, she bundled them up and thought that, surely, if she looked hard enough, she would find a recycling bin. So began her quest.

Her first stop, the team’s hotel, told her they don’t collect recyclables and the bottles would just need to go in the trash. She googled recycling locations but — as Google sometimes does — it led her astray, taking her down deserted roads to a large industrial recycling plant with posted signs that read “No Dumping.” When returning her rental vehicle, bottles in tow, she was again told, “Sorry, we don’t have recycling.” Though tempted to check the bag of bottes, she left them behind to forever remain in a landfill as decades of unfortunate evidence of an otherwise great trip. Frustrated with the experience, my colleague reached out to me for an explanation and my response to her is embedded in this blog.

The short answer is that U.S. recycling systems rely on an outdated funding model that has left much of the country with under-operational or even absent recycling operations. The vast majority of recycling infrastructure in the U.S. is entirely funded by regional taxpayer dollars. This puts recycling infrastructure in high competition with other public services — like education and public safety — forcing many municipalities to view recycling as a luxury rather than the climate and economic necessity it is. Accordingly, 40% of Americans  — including the residents of Marietta, Georgia — lack equitable access to recycling, meaning that recycling is as accessible as landfilling.

Even high-quality materials – those that are clean, that have a chemical makeup that allows them to be recycled instead of downcycled, and that are in high demand by users of recycled content – are frequently lost to landfills due a dearth of collection and recycling infrastructure. For example, Gatorade bottles and most other beverage containers are typically made of polyethylene terephthalate, known as PET or Plastic #1 — the most highly sought-after recycled plastic. Yet even PET bottles are recycled at only a 30% rate across the country, a figure that has barely moved in the 20+ years that As You Sow has been following the issue. The real kicker is that dozens of major consumer goods companies including PepsiCo — the maker of Gatorade — have goals to increase the amount of recycled content in their bottles, yet complain that they can’t get enough recycled material.

The solution to this recycling disparity is Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), whereby producer corporations that make the packaging (bottles, bags, wrap, etc.) finance the collection and recycling of their packaging at its end-of-life. To institute EPR for packaging would shift the financial burden to expand and modernize U.S. recycling infrastructure away from taxpayers and onto corporations. EPR has the potential to eliminate recycling “dead zones,” as producers would need to ensure sustainable end-of-life management for their packaging wherever their product is sold.  EPR will also provide companies with enough recycled content to meet their sustainability goals and prevent limited natural resources, like oil and gas-derived plastics, from being needlessly landfilled.

Mandated EPR policies are gaining ground across the U.S., with the adoption of new laws in Maine, Oregon, Colorado, and California. At the federal level, EPR legislation has repeatedly been introduced. If this policy trend of holding corporations financially accountable for their packaging waste continues, corporations may face an annual global financial risk of approximately $100 billion.  It is to companies’ benefit to proactively manage this risk, rather than waiting for it to be a matter of legal compliance.

As You Sow has been urging corporations to adopt EPR for over a decade. In 2012 we published an early report on the topic: Unfinished Business: The Case for Extended Producer Responsibility for Post-consumer Packaging. In recent years we have published Corporate Plastic Pollution Scorecards ranking companies, in part, by their efforts to support EPR, including making voluntary contributions to recycling infrastructure proportional to the amount of packaging they use. Currently, dozens of companies voluntarily contribute funds to recycling infrastructure, though none donate what they need to – $88 for every metric ton of plastic according to the groundbreaking Plastics IQ tool by The Recycling Partnership, the leading national non-profit working to enhance curbside recycling .

After years of dialogue, As You Sow has begun to file shareholder resolutions with companies that do not have a public statement of support for EPR or that do not financially support recycling infrastructure. Our first EPR proposal was filed with Constellation Brands for the 2023 season and received support from 25% of shareholders. As You Sow has filed additional proposals with Hormel and Tyson for the upcoming season.

To universalize recycling, tackle plastic pollution, preserve natural resources, and create a circular economy, companies must extend their perceived responsibility past the point of sale and through to the end-of-life of their packaging.