Every piece of packaging on a store shelf carries a hidden family tree, tracing back to its raw origins and projecting forward into its ultimate end market. As regulatory compliance tightens, mastering extended producer responsibility has transformed from a back-office obligation into a fundamental driver of systemic circularity. This episode explores how lineage, local identity, and historical narrative shape modern environmental accountability. From California’s evolving regulations to generational lessons from river restoration, discover why long-term change requires anchoring in core values rather than short-term metrics. Unpack critical industry developments—including chain of custody models, fee structures, and the power of reframing sustainability messaging around restoration. Tune in for a thought-provoking deep dive into connecting material heritage with future-proof circular design.
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Extended Producer Responsibility: Roots, Nostalgia, And The Circular Economy
The Family Tree Of Materials
I am excited to talk to you. It's going to be a solo episode. I'm veering a little bit from my typical topics and sharing a bit of a personal reflection I've been having lately. Every piece of packaging you put on a shelf has a family tree. It came from an oil well, a forest, a mine or recycling plant. It moved through a converter, a filler, a distributor, and likely a store. When it's done, it goes somewhere like a landfill, a MRF, or a bale. Maybe it's put on a ship and sent overseas. Every piece of packaging has a life, has an origin story and has a place that it's going.
Most of the last 50 years, almost nobody tracked that family beyond the point of purchase. Globalization has made it hard to know, but it's also brought us innovation that makes it cheaper to start thinking about tracking this. EPR is infusing investment into this. EPR is requiring reporting. It's requiring a definition of a responsible end market. It requires chain of custody documentation. All of it comes down to one requirement, needing to know where your stuff comes from and where it's going.
In this episode, I want to talk about roots, people and materials and about a study that I heard about in 2025 that found that many people who tune out the climate story are asking for things to go back to the way they used to be. They still want circularity. They still want recycling. It's just how you present the information that can shut people down if they don't agree. Is that what circular means to go back to the way things were? I don't know if that's totally true. In some cases, it is, and some cases, it's making what was old new again.
Decoding The Circular Economy And Chain Of Custody
A quick vocabulary check, circular economy or restorative by design. The common definition from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation describes a circular economy as restorative and regenerative by design. The important part of this definition is by design. A system that loops because people can't afford something different or goods are scarce, isn't the same as a system designed to loop. The difference is the whole reason why maybe the argument isn't that we're going back to the way things used to be but that we are now designing things hopefully for circularity.
Chain of custody. The documentation trail of a material from source to final product. It's how you prove recycled content is making its way back into a package. It's also how you prove that something is moving through the recycling stream. Some models physically separate recycled material. Others, like, mass balance, track it on paper across a mixed stream and do more of an average. Colorado's approved program plan allows several chain of custody models and requires third party certification of the credit method.
Chain of custody is a materials family tree and the documentation to support it. You have to provide that documentation in order to receive the credit. Whether it be through reimbursement, or through the use of recycled content. Deposit return scheme, bottle bill, deposit return system, this is where you pay a small deposit when you buy a beverage container and you get that small deposit back when you return it to the correct return location. This is only available in ten states such as Maine, Michigan, New York, Hawaii, and a few others.
There's about ten states that have this system. There's also using deposits like a return of reusable. The example I always think about which isn't always prevalent here, but in Germany, you go to a Christmas market and you can spend €2 to get a mug and then you can return the mug and get your €2 back. This is a common type of methodology for incentivizing consumers to return the reusable vessel or package or plate or what have you. There's source reduction, which is this idea of using less material or using less virgin material, using more recycled material, but reducing the use of virgin plastic at the source.
This is a requirement through California as a C-54 but oftentimes, lightweighting is a form of source reduction, which is a pretty valuable way to have a sustainability play alongside price. There's usually cost savings with this now. The challenge is sometimes, if you lightweight too much, it turns into something that is deemed as flexible film and no longer recycled or its to a smaller size, and then you're less than two inches and again, no longer considered recyclable. There's reuse and people have said things like, “Go back to glass milk bottles, to the milkman,” type of thinking. There are pilots and activities out there where people are bringing back the milkman.
EPR Enforcement And Industry News Roundup
News roundup. The theme in the news lately is that EPR has moved into enforcement, lawsuits and proving that it works. A few key news stories. CAA has submitted its revised SB 54 program plan to CalRecycle, and shortly after that announcement, the CEO of Circular Action Alliance has stepped down and Jeff Myers is acting CEO until they find someone new. Jeff Myers was a very early leader at Circular Action Alliance, but who's to know if he'll become CEO or if they'll find a different leader? The program plan incorporated lots of comments from the public.
Every piece of packaging you put on a shelf has a family tree. It came from an oil well, a forest, a mine or recycling plant.
They've outlined what they Incorporated and what the comments were alongside the submission they sent over to Cal Recycle. The California fees were also announced and they had originally announced an illustrative fee schedule and generally many of the fees that were now announced hit towards that lower end of the range, which is generally good news for producers. Colorado moves to dismiss the EPR challenge. There was a similar lawsuit against Colorado's EPR bill that was also in Oregon put forth by the National Association of Wholesalers or NAW.
Now, Colorado is using Oregon's decision to move for that lawsuit to be dismissed. Colorado's program is live and those are being billed. Nothing is paused. This is just one to watch. There's movement here, so we'll see if the movement to dismiss is accepted. S&P Global reports the premium recycled pet usually carries over virgin has collapsed to effectively zero because virgin feed stock costs are climbing mostly due to tariffs, I believe.
In the short term, our pet is an easy sell on price but we'll see if that maintains. The price didn't drop obviously but the virgin price has gone up. When the virgin price drops again, the premium comes back, and recyclers margins get squeezed. Textiles and the big brands fund the back end while the industry admits EPR is going to take some time to fix textile recycling. There were three textile stories that I saw. On one side, H&M and Adidas joined a coalition with the Or Foundation to improve post-consumer textile flows tied to the Canton Manto market in Ghana where a huge volume of the world's secondhand clothing ends up.
An industrial panel said publicly that textile EPR alone will not close collection sorting and recycling gaps quickly. A rehab's advisor described textile and textile recycling as stuck in a supply and demand deadlock. There's no buyers without volume and no volume without buyers. There's a lot of news happening on both sides of the story here and in textile EPR. I expect textile EPR to be more at the center as the California textile EPR program plan should come out in 2027 or 2028. The need is as soon as ‘27 and the program plan is 2030 or something like that.
Roots, Rivers, And Generational Resilience
That's a little bit of news going on. To get back to this concept of the roots of our materials, but also our people. I've read a book called The Water Remembers by Amy Bowers Cordalis. Cordalis is a Yurok tribal member. To be clear, I've listened to it. I’ve not read it, which is my new favorite way to consume more non-fiction books. In September of 2002 when she was 22, she was interning with the tribe's fishery department when tens of thousands of adult Chinook salmon died in the Klamath River. Estimates run from about 34,000 to 78,000 fish. She saw it happen and described it in great detail.
The fish are leaping out of the water gasping for air or water. They had this gill disease that they just died in front of her eyes. She was on the river when this happened. It was after they'd already been a lot of pushback from the Yurok tribal nation that the river was unwell. That fish kills, what they call, started a movement to remove the dams. That took two decades of organizing. Later, Federal regulators approved, and the last four Klamath dams came down in October of 2024.
What stuck with me is that the fight didn't start in 2002 when she saw this, the fishkill. Her great uncle had won a US Supreme Court case on Yurok fishing rights in 1973. Her family had been defending the river against the US government for generations. Beyond the fact that it was rooted in their belief system that the health of their people was tied to the health of the river. This is a beautiful religion around the earth, the river and these fish, these salmon were as important as their people. In fact, they needed to coexist in order to survive.
They knew exactly where they came from and they could see exactly what the river was supposed to look like. That gave them a time horizon and a view that many of us don't have. In many ways, we talk about waste diversion challenges or climate change challenges or significant weather events as these things that happen perhaps to you, but mostly to other people. Not necessarily even where you are routed from if you even feel as though you have deep roots in a particular location with globalization.
At a certain point, they were encouraged to go off to college and to other areas. Most Americans do not go to college for their form. I certainly didn't and I think many people think of themselves as transient and moving between places until they buy a house or until they have children. There's this overall sentiment of, which part of it is my problem versus your problem? I do think there's a shift back towards localization and community in a way that is promising.
The younger generation is much more active even in what their colleges do. Thinking about local government as a viable pathway to participate in what is maybe something that you disagree with or agree with. Ultimately, when I'm saying a system change runs on generational time lines. Not fiscal timelines. Maine passed the first packaging EPR law and the US in 2021 and five years later, its stewardship RFP got zero bids and producers there still have no obligations. If your organization measures circularity progress quarter to quarter, you'll conclude nothing is working and you'll quit maybe even before anything gets started, or you start to see any results.
The people who win long fights are the ones who are anchored to a belief system. Anchored to something. This anchor doesn't have to be tied to your roots. It helps in the instance of the Klamath River, but it's not the only way to find purpose in the work that you do. It's not the only way to see results in the recycling space or in the climate change space and the circular economy space. It is helpful to recognize where the work has come from and where it's going.
Connecting Heritage, Identity, And Anti-Litter Campaigns
It started getting me to this thinking of like, is fighting waste and trash in my blood? Is it in my roots? What is the part of my roots that I want to celebrate or anchor against? Am I doing this work because of where I come from? I grew up in Texas. If you grew up in Texas in the ‘80s or still, you may or may not know the slogan, “Don't Mess with Texas,” which was originally an anti-litter campaign. Now, it's a bit like, “Don't mess with me because I'm a Texan,” vibe. Originally, it was an anti-litter campaign, like, “Don't litter on our highways.”
The State Transportation Department launched it in 1986. It was aimed at people throwing beer cans and fast-food bags out of pickup trucks. This phrase is turning 40 in 2026. It worked because it made not littering a matter of Texas identity. Not about environmentalism. It wasn't about for generations to come. It was about today. Don't make our highways messy. Don't take pride and where you are and where you are going and being outside in our beautiful state. My partner is from Maine, and that's a steep with a long thrift ethic and has had a bottle bill since the ‘70s.
In the ‘80s, Texas was telling people not to mess with it. There was a Maine town full of people with the same last name as my husband. The whole town was on the reunion committee because they all had the same last name. It was from the same place, and they were celebrating being from there. Is this heritage? Is knowing more about where you're from your heritage? Is that your culture? What is your culture? This is a question my son was being asked to answer as a part of this reflection competition.
Framing Sustainability Through Tradition And Pride
In part, yes. Where you are and where you come from is your heritage. The experience you've had along the way shapes the culture that you want to build for you and your family and your work. Not because values are inherited in your blood but because they're handed down through stories through saying things like, “Don't Mess with Texas,” “Use it up.” “Wear it out. “Make it do.” The question isn't whether you have a heritage route rooted in this because everybody comes from somewhere. The question is, which pieces of it do you choose to bring forward into your day-to-day decisions into your business work and to your community and how you spend your time?
The point I'm trying to make is that the most effective environmental campaign in Texas history never uses the word environment. They use identity, pride, and a sense of who you are. When you're trying to move a stakeholder who doesn't share your sustainability vocabulary like a CFO, a rule legislator, or a plant manager, start with what they're already proud of. Not what you want them to care about, but what are you doing to move their points of pride forward to be in line with their identity?
As I said, this is something that's been rattling around in my brain, both reading this book and thinking about the role of community, sustainability and driving sustainable solutions. I wanted to bring this up because if we think about it, materials have roots too. They come from somewhere, whether that's newly removed from the earth, or they are a reuse of something. They still have roots figuratively and potentially have roots. Globalization has made it harder for people to hold on to where they're from and it did the same thing for materials.
A PET bill can be sorted in one state, sold through a broker or reprocessed in another country, and then come back as fiber. A shirt could be donated in Colorado and resold in Ghana. Mixed bails, blended resins, global brokers, each step makes it cheaper and easier. Not to know where something is going or where it came from. EPR and work in the circular economy and recycling in the circular economy and reuse at its core, it requires. You don't know where your stuff comes from and where it's going. People in the supply chain world took a lot about traceability but circular economy requires this level of traceability after something is sold. That's where you have no control.
Globalization has made it harder for people to hold on to where they're from and it did the same thing for materials.
We can think about it in the various pieces of reporting chain of custody in responsible end markets. With reporting, you have to know what you put on the market by material, by state. You also need to know what you collect, what you process, and what you transport by material, by state. That is a very difficult part of EPR compliance. Chain of custody in mass balance. If you claim to recycle content, you have to prove its lineage with certification in some states.
We need to know in order to get reimbursement. You need to show a handoff where you picked up the material. Who you sold it to, how much was sold, and how much moved to the next phase. All the way down to the responsible in the market and where the material at its raw material standpoint is being sold and put back into a product. Responsibly meaning it can't have a worse environmental impact than doing it from a virgin material.
Know where you're going, part of this. A responsible end market is a material’s destination. Hopefully, that destination is multiple times. It's not once. In some cases, you might be turning into a responsible end market. That is a durable good. Either way, it's going somewhere that is being reused in a responsible way but the trade-off is traceability costs money. Producers are spending money on data, systems, packaging, spec, cleanup, and supplier documentation. Their suppliers are getting certifications. The recyclers have to keep track of their documentation. If they were a business already, they would need EPR to change the economics. There's not a lot of wiggle room in the finances there.
The same thing if you think about the Yurok family and how they held on to their roots and where their beliefs were. What my husband's family in Maine has documented and now, I'm sure there's many last names in this town. Nonetheless, there's still a pretty decent size population of people with very unique last names in this state. All of it is a record of where you came from. Without it, you can't defend claims. My husband won't buy Texas cowboy boots because he feels like he's not a Texan. He doesn't deserve them or something, which I'm like “Whatever you want.”
Knowing where you came from and how that wraps up into your identity, the same thing with materials, it becomes something you can defend. It can be something that is enough about and it becomes something you can potentially talk about publicly on your package. Also, a way to potentially, hopefully, optimize your EPR fees. You can't do that if you can't prove the progress. Is this about going back to the way things used to be?
In 2025, a sustainable brands speaker presented research showing that many people who don't connect to the climate narrative and climate change narrative are looking for things to go back to the way they used to be. That lines up with a peer-reviewed work in a 2016 study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that conservatives became more supportive of environmental action when messages compared today to a better past rather than warning about a worse future. They also gave more to a charity framed around restoring the past.
Conservative environmental concern went up when messages were framed around purity and keeping things clean or focused on your health rather than harm or fairness. Not every researcher thinks reframing can overcome the polarized climate in this country. For the purposes of this discussion, these findings are useful. I think a lot of people who tune out to save the planet respond to restore what we had. It isn't what's circular, the milkman, glass bottle with a deposit, repairing the toaster, right to repair your tractor, hand-me-downs, and buying less of what we call aviation and reuse. It’s something that maybe our grandparents already had.
Nostalgia Versus Systemic Change In Circularity
If your internal sustainability pitch isn't landing, test a restoration frame. Think about refill and reuse, deposit systems, repair and resale programs. Think about the health benefits of not having stuff leech out into our water table through landfills. These are all the same outcomes, but just a different point to anchor on. To play devil's advocate here, I do want to push back. The past wasn't necessarily circular by design. It was more circular by scarcity or circular by cost savings. People reused the milk bottle because a new one cost money.
The dairy was 10-miles away and labor was cheap. The moment disposables became cheaper, we dropped those systems. I mentioned in another episode, Life Magazine, celebrating throwaway living in 1955 or somewhere around there. Nostalgic skips this part of why we made the shift. You can't just unwind the global system. A local glass bottle route made sense with a local dairy but that's not the case anymore. Now, we're shipping dairy across the country, across the ocean. Glass is heavy and expensive to move. That extra weight would raise transfer to missions well enough to erase the benefit of a reuse.
Many people who don't connect to the climate narrative are looking for things to go back to the way they used to be.
Reuse only wins when you have multiple returns. Washing capacity in reverse logistics. That's infrastructure that's required. There's also a green washing wrist to old fashioned. Classic glass are marketing words. Not environmental claims. It's a nostalgic package, but if it's heavier, if it's less recyclable, if it never comes back, it's just a story, not a systemic change.
I challenge you to keep the values of the past, but not the systems. Thrift repair accountability to a place knowing where things come from, but then we need to build the systems for the future. Date dissertation, EPR fee infrastructure or fee structures that incentivize change in the system. Making the full life of a package. The responsibility of the market.
A couple takeaways. One, roots buy you a long-time horizon. The Klamath fight took more than twenty years after the fish kill and generations before that. Maine CPR law is five years old and still not in operation. Organizations without an anchor give up in year three. Decide what you're anchored to. Two, Know where your materials come from and where they're going. That's what circularity is about. That's what EPR reporting is about. Chain of custody, responsible in markets all demand knowing where you're going and where you came from.
If your packaging data still can't tell that story by material and by state. That needs to be your pathway to data quality and improvement in the coming years. Three, use the past as a frame but not a blueprint. Restore what we had reached people. Save the planet may not, but don't confuse nostalgia with a circular system. You still have to understand what the systemic change needs are before we can think about going back.
What To Watch Next In EPR And Policy
What to watch next? Cal Recycle will make a decision on the California program plan and that will include a decision on the fee schedule. Colorado and Oregon still have open litigation to keep an eye on and then, we'll see what happens with Maine if they reissue a stewardship RFP or if they build something from scratch in the state. For producers, take a look. There's a lot of t things out there available for comment. Some have passed, but this includes the California state addendum. This includes for both producers and service providers.
The Minnesota needs assessment is available to look at. There's a lot of opportunities to get your point of view across to the states and/or to Circular Action Alliance. Take your chance. For everybody, documentation is your heritage in this circular system. Reimbursement goes to whoever can prove what they collected. Proper fees are aligned to whatever yours you've sold. Having a clear understanding and ability to document the heritage of the materials that you use is going to be critical to optimizing your participation in this system.
The mindset shift I'm going to offer is tradition and change aren't opposites. The family name in that town in Maine didn't stay rooted by refusing to change. They stayed rooted by choosing to remember and to honor where you came from and still build something new. One practical step, pick one product and trace it. Where did the material come from? Where does the package go after use in your biggest market?
If you can't answer these questions, that is your first EPR project. Not as a strategy deck, but as a family tree in a packaging. Embrace change with tradition because we're not trying to go backwards. The past where we are nostalgic for doesn't exist anymore. The local dairy is gone and the town reunion was 40 years ago. What we can do is carry forward what was good about it like thrift, accountability, and pride of place and build systems that make those values work at the scale we live at now. That's what a circular economy is. Not going backwards, but coming back around better than we were before. Don't forget, change is uncomfortable, but progress requires it.
Important Links
How a Yurok family played a key role in the world’s largest dam removal project
CAA shares revised California EPR program plan, announces CEO change
Colorado Takes a Page from Oregon’s Playbook And Tries to Partially Dismiss EPR Challenge
Recycled-virgin PET spread hits zero amid rising virgin feedstock costs
Conservatives can be persuaded to care more about the environment, study finds