In just two weeks, any substantially sized company that produces packaging sold within Colorado — from plastic to glass to wood — must be registered with a new industry-led organization that will soon begin charging fees to fund a statewide recycling system.
The deadline comes more than two years after the Legislature approved the first-of-its-kind makeup for the funding and administration of the programs, and the deadline has been moved up nine months from what that law originally anticipated. And while the Circular Action Alliance is still working to determine how many companies will be affected by the fee, the watchdog Colorado Consumer Coalition estimates the total could be about 1,500.
Because there is no existing list of producers of packaging materials that are sold in in the state, Alliance officials have been working numerous avenues to try to track down those companies, said Olivia Barker, statewide engagement and communications director. Those include working through trade associations and local chambers of commerce, collaborating with municipal organizations with tie-ins to the business community and buying ads in media.
Why it’s important that packaging producers register
While state law requires producers — those who create packaging bundling consumer goods, from six-pack holders to coffee bags — to register by Oct. 1, the ferocity of enforcement is up to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The fees, to be clear, will be assessed on both recyclable and non-recyclable packaging material.
Still, Barker emphasized that the Alliance can’t calculate fees that producers will have to start paying by the start of 2026 until it knows the number of “members” that the producer-responsibility organization will have and the volume and weight of affected packaging.
And as such, the Alliance is in a sprint now to find those companies and inform them of their non-negotiable membership. As part of that, it’s conducting a series of meetings with the business community, including one that will be hosted Tuesday by the Colorado Chamber Alliance.
“Producer registration is going to be a never-ending thing. The most critical piece is that producers are registered with us,” Barker said in an interview. “That full registration is critical for saying ‘This is your share of the calculation costs.’ … If a producer is unaccounted for, then you end up with free riders in the system.”
How the new program will work
The system is one that legislators chose to create to boost reuse of materials in a state that boasts a recycling and composting rate of just 16% — about half of the national average, according to the Colorado Public Interest Research Group. To have makers of packaging pay for the system, the chosen producer-responsibility organization, Circular Action Alliance, will impose fees on them based upon the volume of such packaging materials sold in Colorado, as well as recyclability of the materials (with those harder to put into reuse paying more).
There are numerous exemptions for packaging producers. Businesses that earn less than $5 million in revenue annually don’t have to pay the fee, nor do printers of newspapers or books. Packaging used for many hazardous materials, medical products and drugs is not covered, nor are packaging materials used for long-term storage or in industrial and manufacturing processes.
Signing up is easy, as producers can do so quickly at a site operated by the Circular Action Alliance. But getting hold of all the producers who fit under the definition of businesses covered by the law is the tricky part.
The largest companies, including a number who have supported the proposal since it was first introduced, tend to know about the program already. But Barker said officials worry that smaller companies may not know about the programs, and that is why they are working through business organizations and CDPHE to find them.
Concerns about packaging fees
Jaime Gardner, executive director of the Colorado Consumer Coalition, said that while businesses have not expressed concern about the registration date being moved up, she is concerned that smaller packaging producers haven’t been contacted. And she is concerned too that businesses being asked to sign up for a system that will require them to pay fees have no idea yet how much their fees will be, though she expects that funding a $310 million system could create substantial costs.
This part, Barker said, is the conundrum: Before the Alliance calculates the per-business fee, it must know how many businesses will be paying into the system and how much material they will be paying to recycle. A team of fee-setting experts already is working to create a methodology, but a full roster of members is vital to make that work, she said.
CDPHE will hold a rulemaking in the second or third quarter of 2025 on what is known as eco-modulation — an approach to fee-setting that encourages producers to use more easily recycled material or packaging made with recycled material. Eco-modulation is one of the factors that will determine the final fees, which the Alliance anticipates announcing around October 2025, after it has been able to study the data reported by registered producers over the first six months of next year.
And any producer who is not signed up with the organization by July 1 will not be permitted to sell products into Colorado.
“Still a lot of unknowns”
The process has created some frustrations, Gardner said.
“There’s still a lot of unknowns out there,” she said. “Regardless of when the deadline is, there are probably hundreds of Colorado businesses that don’t know they are going to be on the hook for this.”
Even after the fee is set, the Alliance will have a lot of work to do. It must work with private haulers and government agencies across the state to coordinate weekly pickup for most state residents and biweekly pickup for more rural areas. And it must work to help develop a closed-loop recycling system in which materials collected in the state are broken down and then sold to companies that can use the recycled materials in their goods.
