The Packaging Policy Divide in the U.S. and Europe

Earlier this month, I participated in a Linkedin live discussion with my colleagues from the European Container Glass Federation (FEVE). We discussed the differences in emerging EU and US packaging regulations. We thought this would be helpful, not only to update the global glass value chain on the status of laws and regulations, but to dispel some myths. In addition, we wanted to highlight matters that effect our customers - brands that use glass - who may need to know about the packaging law at their product's destination.

It was a great discussion, and one that I hope to have again with other associations over the course of the next year or so. Given time constraints, we could not go into great detail about how the industry operates in North America compared to Europe. Therefore, I thought it would help to explain more here about what we are up against in the US with regard to sustainable packaging policy.

First, the US is just getting started in the sustainable packaging law journey compared to Europe. There is little to no federal country level packaging law in the way we think of extended producer responsibility (EPR) for packaging. The US largely leaves this to the state governments. The federal solid waste and hazardous materials disposal laws have not had major overhaul in 40 to 50 years. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976 was last updated in 1984 with a set of amendments that focused on waste minimization and landfill disposal.

The longest existing recycling programs in the US are the states with bottle deposit return laws, which were institute largely in the 1970s and 1980s. They acted as anti-litter initiatives after a wave of beer companies embraced single use packaging. Per person, waste levels dramatically increased with this change away from refillable glass to "convenience" packaging. Landfill capacity became an issue, as did environmental waste and litter levels.

While we still have 10 states with beverage container deposit return laws in the US, we now also have seven state EPR for packaging laws. Three states have both: California, Maine and Oregon. 10 Canadian provinces have some manner of bottle deposit return laws, and eight have also adopted EPR for packaging. Most of these are a decade or more ahead of the US states in terms of implementation.

While in Europe, many see deposit return schemes as duplicative to EPR for curb side packaging. In the US, the glass industry gets nearly 60% of the usable clean cullet for remanufacturing from the 10 states with DRS, due to the heavy contamination of commingled recycling. Those states combined have just over 25% of the population but produce over half the usable, clean, recovered glass that can be used in US glass furnaces. (Although we know that some cullet from Canada has been used in plants closer to the border in previous years.)

Glass is the most effected commodity from that stream, and a majority of the states have laws that make it even more difficult to recover and reuse glass, even states with a heavy presence of glass manufacturing plants.

Virginia,  Pennsylvania,  Indiana, and Oklahoma have laws that allow commingled glass recovered in single-stream recycling to be used as "alternative daily cover" for landfills and count it as "recycling" when there are glass manufacturing plants in the states that need the raw material.

Even now, as recycling policy advances, there are efforts to convince local governments in states with glass manufacturing to abandon recycling altogether and revert to incineration. Or worse, buy into the concept that everything can be put into one bin and then be sorted by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots. This could result in metals and rigid plastics being removed from the trash, while glass and paper would be burned, and the remaining contents would be turned into aggregate blocks, earning carbon credits for the process.

So, when comparing the US journey, one where the glass industry is trying to lead and increase our sustainability, we have substantial headwinds that have decades of resistance from those pushing "convenience" and masquerading it as sustainable.

This article was originally published in the April/2026 issue of Glass International, available here.