06/27/2025

Maine Cites Costs as it Loosens Packaging EPR Law

Plastics News | Steve Toloken | June 26, 2025

Maine Cites Costs as it Loosens Packaging EPR Law

Maine Gov. Janet Mills has signed industry-backed legislation that loosens requirements in the state's extended producer responsibility program for packaging, a move supporters said makes it more sensitive to costs and brings it in line with EPR elsewhere in the country.

The new legislation, LD 1423, creates bigger carveouts for business-to-business and other packaging in the state's original 2021 EPR law, to try to address worries that EPR will raise prices for businesses and consumers.

But some environmental groups and cities argued that numerous exemptions in the new law will make the EPR program less effective. They say they're concerned about a different kind of cost — what taxpayers shell out to manage packaging waste and recycling.

The new law in Maine comes as California Gov. Gavin Newsom in March ordered a rewrite of rules for packaging EPR there, citing costs to consumers and small businesses.

As well, concerns over the price tag for EPR played a role in defeating a packaging EPR bill in New York's legislature in early June, although EPR backers there said the cost issues were greatly exaggerated.

Packaging groups Ameripen and the Flexible Packaging Association, as well as Maine business groups, backed LD 1423, which Mills, a Democrat, signed June 20.

One of the chief sponsors of the new law, state Sen. Joseph Baldacci, D-Bangor, told a legislative committee that Maine's original law risked being an outlier among the seven states that have passed packaging EPR, and as a result raising costs in the sparsely populated state.

Baldacci said he supports the goals of the Maine's original law, to ease the financial burden on taxpayers and shift waste and recycling costs to companies, but said implementation of the 2021 law needed to be improved.

"One major concern is the prescriptive application of fees on producers of packaging," he said in a hearing before the new law passed. "Based on what we are learning in other states, the current structure of Maine's EPR packaging program makes our state an outlier, adding to challenges already facing Maine businesses such as inflation, tariffs, workforce shortages and high operating costs."

But some city officials, like the mayor of Portland, said the changes could hurt municipal budgets by delaying EPR implementation.

The National Stewardship Action Council said some of Maine's changes amounted to a "last gasp attempt" to rollback the original EPR law.

The Maine chapter of the Surfrider Foundation said expanding exemptions for packaging for medical, hazardous and industrial products will take too much authority from the state's Department of Environmental Protection, which is charged with implementing the 2021 law.

"Reducing the range of packaging covered under the program will weaken its overall impact and shift power away from the DEP," Surfrider said in a statement.

But one of the chief sponsors of the new law, state Rep. Victoria Doudera, D-Camden, said the changes have bipartisan support, and said the state's EPR program will boost Maine's paper industry in developing alternatives to plastics packaging.

"This is a broadly supported amendment that improves the program while protecting its intent and goals," she said in a June 17 speech on the House floor. "It supports our renowned forest products industry, which is innovating paper-based plastic alternatives right here in Maine."

The paper industry backed the new law.

One analysis of LD 1423, by the law firm Keller and Heckman LLP, said it also expands the definition of recycled content to include post-industrial material, and clarifies the definition of "toxicity" to only include materials intentionally added to a product.