By Sheila A. Millar, a partner, and Antonia Stamenova-Dancheva, counsel, with Keller and Heckman in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office.
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Introduction
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a regulatory approach that shifts responsibility for the end of a product’s lifecycle—meaning the cost of disposal—away from local governments and consumers to producers or other businesses in the distribution chain. Goals are to reduce landfill waste, promote recycling and reuse, and encourage innovation in product design and disposal. The policy concept is not new; many states have long had EPR programs for diverse product categories, including electronics, mattresses, carpeting, paint, batteries, and more. Packaging EPR laws have been adopted in five states (California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon) over the last four years, with more packaging EPR legislation expected to pass in 2025.
However, a new category—textiles—is now the focus of EPR legislation. Last year California became the first state to impose EPR obligations on producers of textile and apparel articles with the passage of the Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024 (RTRA or Act). RTRA is modeled on California’s packaging EPR law, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act (SB 54), and just as packaging EPR legislation has spread from state to state, textile EPR legislation is already under consideration in more states.
EPR programs are distinct from efforts to prompt voluntary or mandatory environmental and social governance (ESG) reporting but have their roots in similar concerns. Just as pictures of plastic waste have helped catalyze adoption of packaging EPR legislation, the sheer volume of discarded apparel and textiles and criticism of environmental and other impacts of “fast fashion” seem to be a significant factor in this focus on textile waste. Below, we review international and domestic concerns over textile waste, provide an overview of California’s RTRA, and offer a few observations of the practical implications of RTRA and other EPR schemes on businesses. California’s RTRA will likely serve as a model for other textile EPR legislation in the U.S. Indeed, a textile EPR bill modeled on RTRA was introduced in Washington on January 20, 2025 and a 2024 New York textile EPR bill was re-introduced in the state’s senate on January 24, 2025.
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