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On May 31, 2026, companies selling packaging, paper and foodservice materials in the U.S. face a major regulatory milestone: the first coordinated deadline for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) reporting. Six states—California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington—all expect detailed data reports on the same day, forcing companies to navigate a complex patchwork of state-specific templates and material definitions.

To discuss the challenges of meeting both imminent and long-term EPR requirements, we recently sat down with Anna Kendall, U.S. EPR Leader at Ernst & Young LLP.

Surprise Factor. We asked Kendall about aspects of EPR that tend to surprise even experienced sustainability or packaging leaders.

"Companies are sometimes caught off guard by the size and scale of EPR fees—either in one state or as they think about extrapolating them out," Kendall notes.

May 31 Reporting Deadline. We asked Kendall about some of the challenges that companies are facing as the coordinated reporting deadline approaches.

"The two areas I would say companies are struggling with most often are interpretation and data collection," Kendall said. "One example would be in the pharmaceutical or medical-device space. We do see a lot of categorical exclusions for FDA-regulated products, but companies have to decide whether that also extends to the transport packaging—secondary packaging or tertiary packaging."

Cross-Functional Coordination. With EPR touching everything from sustainability to finance to the supply chain, we asked Kendall how companies are organizing internally to manage that complexity.

"Like with most new requirements, we see EPR often starting off as a hot potato, with no one really wanting to own EPR compliance reporting," Kendall said. "There certainly has been an emerging trend—especially among food and beverage and consumer goods companies—to hire full-time EPR roles.

"Where that’s not possible, we’re seeing cross-functional teams collaborating together. In that cross-functional team, we would expect to see folks from legal, tax, finance, IT, supply chain, procurement, sustainability, and sometimes marketing or sales."

Listen to the full interview with Kendall