With a stark change in power in the nation’s capital, this year brings some major landscape shifts for organizations navigating packaging and adjacent policy and regulation. 2025 is also expected to feature more EPR negotiations at the state level, at a time when companies are gearing up for extended producer responsibility programs to go live in Oregon and Colorado.
Trade issues are top of mind for packaging groups. President Donald Trump recently signaled that broad-based tariffs on imports from major trade partners may be enacted as soon as Feb. 1. In recent years, tariffs have also affected the packaging industry on a more substrate-specific basis, including for certain glass and metal imports.
For its part, the Flexible Packaging Association recently implored the Trump administration to take “a refined approach to tariffs that benefit targeted industries while allowing for exemptions for the key inputs that resilient domestic industries rely on.” Meanwhile, the aluminum industry has advocated for “aggressive but targeted” trade enforcement.
Additionally, trade groups such as the American Forest & Paper Association and the plastics-focused American Chemistry Council last month called for a “regulatory reset,” asking that a tailored rulemaking approach replace what they perceived as regulatory overreach under the Biden administration.
These organizations also urged the Trump administration to remain engaged in global plastic pollution discussions, but that the focus remain on “demand-side policies” like improving product design and consumer education – a departure from the Biden administration’s openness to reducing plastic production and eliminating certain chemicals or products.
FPA also sees tax policy under Trump as an avenue to support R&D and capital investments. “Providing a positive regulatory environment, which will allow domestic packaging manufacturers to invest in their communities is a key opportunity that the incoming administration can facilitate,” said FPA President and CEO Dan Felton in a Jan. 21 statement.
EPR discussions are still percolating at the federal level, Ameripen said. Anecdotally, House offices, namely Democrats, have expressed interest in gathering more information on EPR, said Rob Keith, membership and policy director at Ameripen. But following a Senate hearing last year on the potential role of the federal government in packaging EPR, “putting pen to paper on some kind of legislation” is still “a little ways off at this point,” Keith said.
Even as national politics shift in 2025, the real momentum with packaging-specific policymaking is poised to remain in the states, dominated by EPR discussions. Of more than 120 recycling-related state bills tracked in 2024 by the Association of Plastic Recyclers, the greatest number were related to various types of EPR programs.
GPI President Scott DeFife said earlier this month he expects somewhere between five and 10 state legislatures might be relatively active on packaging EPR.
Many of those will be states that have previously seen EPR proposals introduced; states with bills in play so far this year include the likes of New York, Tennessee and Washington.
There’s even greater opportunity this year to take lessons from the process of passing laws behind the first five state programs. Minnesota, the only state to pass a program in 2024, ultimately garnered support from numerous camps.
In theory, lessons from recent history could make EPR negotiations and consensus more efficient and effective in 2025. “There are some areas where the debate has evolved to a certain extent because of the states that have moved forward already,” DeFife said. For instance, there’s been significant work on producer definitions for the laws. “A lot of the industry has agreed that the evolution of the definition of producer — who is a producer, and what is the scope of the law — that those things are settling,” he said.
“We don't have to fight all the same fights” in every state, he said. “A lot of what you see in the Minnesota law was an evolution of some of the debates in some of the other states,” according to DeFife.
Certain aspects hashed out in Washington’s unsuccessful bid to pass EPR last year helped Minnesota’s subsequent efforts in 2024, sources said; the language in Minnesota’s law is in turn is informing Washington’s legislation this session.
Some stakeholders are still urging that jurisdictions lead with needs assessments. Needs assessments-focused bills, which were popular in 2023 in Maryland and Illinois, are in play in multiple states, including New Jersey and Washington. A recent climate law in Massachusetts established a special legislative commission on EPR, which could prompt further legislation.
While EPR is the headline policy, there’s been a trend for bills in some states to address multiple aspects of packaging policy, such as reducing toxics or requiring recycled content. “It makes achieving the middle ground needed to get some of these policies across the finish line a lot harder,” said Andy Hackman, a lobbyist who works on behalf of Ameripen.
Many groups still talk about EPR in the same breath as focusing on deposit return systems or “recycling refund” policies. According to APR, some 10 states discussed bottle deposit policies in 2024, with overlap with many of the states that discussed EPR bills. The Can Manufacturers Institute said in December it planned to push for joint EPR and recycling refund policies in strategic states where it sees political will, with Washington as one key target.
Upstream, a nonprofit focused on the shift from single-use to reuse systems, also remains focused on pushing for robust reuse targets in EPR and DRS bills. The group said all five of the EPR laws that have passed have reuse components, including incentives through ecomodulated fees, explicit targets and funding for infrastructure and systems in some cases. The organization has hired a lobbyist to advocate for reuse in Washington’s packaging EPR negotiations, said CEO Crystal Dreisbach.
“These policy mechanisms are what are going to sort of catalyze all of the change we want to see,” Dreisbach said, noting that city-level policies can also still play an important role.
Economic conditions could also factor more heavily into the likelihood that states actually pass EPR policies in 2025, Hackman explained. “I think the big difference this year is states are running, [generally], significant budget deficits. With the expiration of a lot of the federal funds flowing down to the state level, there's an increased focus on the fiscal side of things,” he said.
This could increase appeal for industry-funded recycling programs. At the same time, Hackman said, inflation and cost concerns that were amplified during the 2024 election could increase legislators’ sensitivity to increasing pressure on the cost of goods.
