What is Colorado’s Extended Producer Responsibility program and how will it benefit you?

Ultimately, the goal of Colorado’s Extended Producer Responsibility system is to raise enough money to cover the cost of ensuring everyone in Colorado has the same level of access to recycling collection as their current trash service.

According to the “medium-scenario” plan, that’s going to cost producers a total of $160-$260 million per year by 2030, which includes buying more carts and recycling trucks, building more recycling facilities and employing more people in the recycling industry.

If you split the low-end ($160 million) and the high-end ($260 million), you get an estimated annual cost of $210 million. That’s a lot of money. 

But we buy a staggering amount of stuff in Colorado.

Colorado’s population is roughly six million people. What if we assume that on average each person buys one can or bottle of Coke each year (Coke doesn’t publicly disclose how much they sell into our state). That’d be six million bottles, all with a small fee assessed. 

$210 million divided by six million would be a fee of $35. That’s an extremely high fee. 

But the consumption of Coke from bottles and cans is likely much higher than one can or bottle per person, per year. 

What if the average Coloradan consumes an average of a six-pack of Coke products a year?  Even that estimate seems cautious, but that would translate to 36 million Cokes a year. Divide that into $210 million and the fee is about $5.83—a smaller fee, but still high. 

But wait, what about Pepsi products? And Dr. Pepper? What about beer companies and the bottles and cans they produce? 

And EPR isn’t just a beverage thing. What about the bags of chips? And the bars of soap? And the containers of shampoo? And, and, and…

What if we’re dividing $210 million by a billion products? Now we’re at a fee of 21 cents. 10 billion products? The fee would be 2.1 cents. And 10 billion is probably still too cautious of an estimate. 

At the end of the day, we buy so much stuff that in order to raise $210 million in Colorado, the required fee per item would be very small.

The CAA has set initial fees on the producers for 2026 as of October 2025 based on the amount and weight of the materials they use. 

Even if a fee is small, if a company has to pay that multiple times because it sells a product with multiple layers of packaging, that cost will add up. 

Before EPR, companies did not experience the cost that the consumers takes on for of dealing with all the packaging (much of it single-use and designed to become trash). 

It was consumers that were left with the tube, box and plastic wrap from a single item we bought. It was consumers and taxpayers that had to pay for the collection and sorting of those items to get them recycled and reused, or pay for their disposal in a landfill, which includes a number of other costs like the pollution that comes from those landfills. 

With EPR, companies have a price signal to reassess whether all that packaging is really needed.

Smart companies will cut out wasteful packaging, saving them money on unnecessary things like plastic shrink wrap around a box or bottle.  

Less packaging means less fees and costs for everyone. 

EPR fees can replace the expenses that producers accrue for materials for packaging. For example, companies can now “mine” for the materials they need from our recycling bins instead of mines in foreign countries, hard to reach areas and pristine places. 

Before EPR, with a statewide recycling rate of 15%, it would be hard for any major company to trust that they could get enough aluminum or glass from Colorado’s recycling system for their products. So, it’s not a surprise they spend so much on mining, drilling and logging virgin materials.

If that rate can jump to nearly 60%, we’re suddenly giving companies a real opportunity to have a reliable supply of aluminum and glass so they can just “mine” from our recycling bins. This is especially valuable for materials like aluminum and glass that can be reused over and over again.

Ultimately, companies need to spend money on getting the materials they need for their packaging. But if the EPR fee is creating a supply stream of materials from Colorado, this fee is less and less a new expense and more an existing expense that is being shifted away from more destructive strategies of finding virgin materials to less destructive reuse and recycling systems. 

A nonprofit called the Circular Action Alliance (CAA) will oversee EPR in Colorado as the Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO). The CAA is made up of representatives from different producers—like Coca Cola and Amazon—who will be responsible for identifying the costs of Colorado’s recycling expansion and the necessary fees to support that. 

The CAA will also be responsible for the operation of the program and implementing any other statutory requirements. 

The CAA works with the Colorado Producer Responsibility Advisory Council to create the EPR plan and implement the system and any other statutory requirements. 

The council is made up of professionals representing several of Colorado’s local governments, waste facilities, nonprofits and packaging suppliers. 

The Colorado Department of Health & Environment (CDPHE) will have final approval on the CAA proposals. 

For many people in Colorado, you may not notice a huge difference in recycling infrastructure. That’s because some municipalities already offer recycling as part of the trash system and you already have weekly or bi-weekly recycling pickup. 

If you live in a community like that, the big benefit is that it will no longer be paid for via your taxes. Producers will pick up the bill, freeing up municipal tax dollars. It’s estimated the City and County of Denver alone could save 16.3 million dollars by 2035.

You may live in an area with a municipal-run trash program but you had to find a local company, and pay a monthly fee, for recycling services. For you, that fee will go away—your recycling will be paid for by producers so you can get recycling the same way you get trash.

Finally, for the huge number of Coloradans who don’t have any curbside recycling but have curbside trash collection, you’ll start getting recycling service paid for by the producers.   

In the coming months, CAA will also be unveiling a new list of recycling guidelines. Designed to be much clearer than past guidelines, this list standardizes what’s recyclable so people don’t need an advanced degree to understand what goes in a recycling bin.

No matter where you are—in the mountains, in the Denver metro area, in the Eastern Plains, etc—you’ll have the same recycling rules. 

With a consistent recycling list created by the organization charged with increasing recycling, you’ll be able to have more confidence that what you put in the recycle bin actually gets recycled. 

Not all materials are created equal—it’s one reason recycling is so complicated. 

Glass and aluminum have a lot of value because they can be reused over and over again. 

Plastics are literally a mixed bag. There are several different kinds of plastics. Some have limited reuse value, while others can’t be reused. 

Some plastics contain chemicals that can be toxic. According to a 2025 study published in Nature, thousands of “chemicals of concern” have been found in plastics. 

So, it’s in all our best interests to incentivize the use of materials for packaging that have a lot of value and disincentivize the stuff with limited value and/or come with higher costs when we use or dispose of them because of toxicity. 

Therefore, Colorado’s EPR law encouraged the adoption of something called “eco-modulation” fees, which create incentives and disincentives for product designs based on recyclability and toxicity. Producers will pay discounted fees for recyclable, non-toxic packaging, but they will be charged an increased fee for using materials that are harder to recycle. 

You can see this modeled in CAA’s 2026 Producer Dues Schedule, where highly recyclable items like glass receive a bonus that reduces its fee from 4.2 cents per pound to 4 cents per pound, while packaging like styrofoam (PS #6 – colored expanded/foamed cushioning) receives maluses that bring its fee up from 160.2 cents per pound to 172 cents per pound. 

Colorado’s finalized eco-modulation plan is forthcoming. 

Companies that decide to use better packaging materials will end up paying less than companies using harmful packaging materials, reducing the amount of stuff that goes to our landfills because it can’t be recycled, and the toxicity of the products we encounter every day.

Nothing we use once—just to wrap something—should go right into a landfill to create pollution. It’s a waste of resources, and we could be using those resources for better things.