New Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws just raised the stakes
By Patrick Boot, chief executive officer (CEO), NNZ North America
New Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws are spreading across the United States, and for potato and vegetable grower-packers, the party on the hook may surprise you. Here is what is changing, why bagged commodities feel it first, and how to think it through without losing sight of packaging’s purpose in the first place.
Ask anyone who has spent time around a packing line, and they will tell you the same thing: packaging is a series of trade-offs. A bag needs to protect the product and let it breathe. It must run on the line, survive the truck, sit well on the shelf, and still come in at a price that works on margins the produce industry can sustain.
Now a new factor is entering the equation in North America, and it comes with a bill attached: Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR.
Working with growers and packers across the United States and Canada, I hear many of the same questions that packaging regulation has been raising in Europe for years. Can we use less material? Can we improve recyclability? Is another format an option, and what happens to performance if we change it?
EPR is now forcing those questions into the open for a lot of operations that had not needed to ask them before.
