Seven states now require you to report the material and weight of every packaging component you ship into them. The law is not the hard part. The hard part is that nobody knows what your film laminate weighs in grams. We build that dataset, keep it current, and file on your schedule.
Book a fixed-fee assessment Check your exposure free
Every state programme asks the same underlying question: how many pounds of each packaging material did you place on our market last year? To answer it you need, for every SKU, every component — the bottle, the closure, the label, the liner, the case, the shipper, the void fill — identified by material and weighed in grams.
Almost no brand between $10M and $250M has that. The specifications sit with your co-packer, your label printer and three film suppliers, none of whom reply quickly. That is why producers report spending one to six months on their first submission.
The tests are not the same in any two states, and exemption is not always automatic. California's threshold is $1M in gross annual sales — five times lower than Oregon's and Washington's $5M — and CalRecycle requires you to register in PEPRS and then apply for the exemption. Staying quiet is not the same as being exempt. The prior question, who the obligated producer even is, changes by SKU, brand and channel. We write the determination down with the statutory basis for each state, so it survives a question from your auditor or your counsel.
We take your product catalogue and build the component-level table. Where a supplier spec exists, we use it. Where it does not, we populate a reference weight from our packaging library, flag it with its tolerance, and put it in the supplier chase queue — so you always know which numbers are measured and which are estimated.
The part that takes months. We send your suppliers the exact table they need to fill in, follow up until they do, read whatever comes back — spec sheets, drawings, an email that says "about 14 grams" — and turn it into structured data. You see the completion rate, not the inbox.
We produce the submission in the format the programme wants and keep your dataset current as SKUs change and states come online. Then we show you where the money is: fees are charged per pound by material, and the spread between the cheapest and most expensive material is more than twenty to one, so a packaging decision made now sets a bill you pay every year.
Typical gram weights for 35 common packaging formats, the material category each falls into, and what that material costs per pound. Every other free EPR resource assumes you already know what your packaging weighs. This is the one that tells you. It also contains the full method for weighing your own — six steps, no tools beyond a kitchen scale.
Four questions, ninety seconds, no email required, nothing stored. Tells you which of the seven states you screen as obligated in and roughly what the fees come to.
Both samples below are real output from the same engine, for composite companies. Every rate is sourced and every estimate is labelled as one — including the ones that undercut our own sales pitch.
Sample determination ($149 tier) Sample assessment ($1,850 tier)
Credited against the assessment if you go further.
Credited in full against the first three months if you continue.
Above 400 SKUs, $1,290/mo. Above 2,000, we quote.
For comparison: a consulting engagement for the same scope is typically quoted in the tens of thousands, and enterprise EPR software is sold on annual contracts with an implementation fee. We publish our prices because the work is repeatable.
| Not a law firm. | We produce data and cost analysis to support your compliance decisions. Producer status determinations that turn on a genuinely contested reading of a statute belong with counsel, and we will say so rather than guess. |
| Not affiliated with any PRO or agency. | We have no relationship with Circular Action Alliance or any state agency. Registering with the PRO is free and you do not need us to do it. |
| Not a fee-optimisation pitch. | For a brand under about $50M, the fees themselves are usually modest. The cost we remove is the two to six weeks of internal time, or the consulting invoice, that producing the data would otherwise take. Fee reduction only becomes the main argument above roughly $100M in packaging-heavy categories. |
| Not big, and not pretending to be. | This is a new, self-funded operation. Our method is published, our sources are linked, and both sample deliverables are online in full before you pay anything. That is the only kind of proof we have earned so far, so it is the kind we offer. |