“We’re hopeful we won’t get hit with it, but we don’t really know how to move forward.”
— Ryan McPhail CEO
Curtis Restaurant Equipment
company buys during the course of the year — regardless of whether they are actually used or sent to customers in Oregon. Sure, Curtis will overstate its total EPR liability, but counting everything will at least avoid penalties, which can amount to a maximum of $25,000 per day. It’s not an ideal solution, but it’s the kind of strategy EPR laws are forcing distributors to consider as they try to navigate vague and often poorly defined legislation. “We’re hopeful we won’t get hit with it, but we don’t really know how to move forward,” McPhail said of Oregon’s EPR law.
Curtis is not alone in that uncertainty. Oregon may have been the first state to implement and begin enforcing its packaging EPR law, but six other states — California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington — have enacted similar legislation, and additional states have been considering adopting their own packaging EPR laws. With the laws becoming more widespread, nearly every distributor is asking questions about how their business will be affected and what, if any, fees they are required to pay. The laws are reshaping the regulatory environment for businesses that supply packaging and packaged goods, including foodservice disposables and the boxes used to ship equipment. Through this new kind of policy framework, states are essentially shifting the financial responsibility for the end-of-life management of certain products from local governments to the businesses that introduce those products into their marketplace. The mechanism for this shift is the establishment of a producer responsibility organization (PRO), a private entity that administers the state’s EPR program and collects fees from companies that are determined to be obligated producers. Those fees are intended to be used to fund programs to create a circular economy by redirecting packaging from becoming waste to other uses or recycling.
FEDA published several resources over the summer designed to help member distributors navigate the
12 FEDA News & Views
emerging EPR regulatory environment. These documents are available at
feda.com/epr-resources. In most cases, FEDA’s research and a review by legal counsel at Holland & Knight LLP found that the obligated producer is the upstream, brand-owning manufacturer, not the distributor. However, there are specific scenarios where a distributor could be the obligated producer. Curtis’ repackaging program is one such example. Others include private-label products that use distributor- specified packaging, generic or unbranded packaged products as the first seller, situations where the distributor is the importer-of-record for foreign-branded equipment, and shipping packaging in direct-to-consumer remote sales.
Even in those situations, there can be exceptions.
Under Oregon’s EPR law, the Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act (RMA), small producers with annual worldwide gross revenue of less than $5 million or producers supplying less than 1 metric ton of regulated products into Oregon on an annual basis do not have to pay fees to the program. But the state’s published guidelines don’t address all the intricacies about how packaging arrives in Oregon, and who should be responsible. Take Curtis’ disposables business. Products such as takeout containers are covered under the Oregon law; however, Curtis purchases those items from another distributor in Oregon. So which one gets counted as the first company to introduce those containers into the state, making it the obligated producer? Similarly, who is the obligated producer for boxes when that packaging was bought from another Oregon company that already brought the boxes into the state? The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality began enforcement against noncompliant producers in early 2026, but the lack of clarity around those kinds of questions has placed Curtis in stasis, McPhail said. If the company is a producer, it needs to register with the state’s PRO, the Circular Action Alliance (CAA) — more on them later. It then must report packaging data and pay fees to CAA. But the obligation only applies after a producer determination analysis verifies that a company is actually the obligated producer. “That’s where we’re stuck,” McPhail said. “Vague guidelines make it difficult to know who is responsible for what.” As of August, Curtis has registered with the CAA in
Oregon and California, but the company is still looking for more guidance from the states. The ambiguity around Oregon’s definition of “market entry,” the point at which an item is considered to have entered the state, has been particularly problematic for distributors. McPhail
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