Recycling Today archives
The Washington-based National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW) has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon challenging the constitutionality of the Oregon law that created its newly enacted extended producer responsibility (EPR) program.
NAW, which describes itself as a “collective voice for the $8 trillion distribution industry” that has 6 million employees nationwide, names the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the Oregon Environmental Commission and Oregon Attorney General Daniel A. Rayfield as defendants in the July 30 filing.
The suing organization claims Oregon’s Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act, which created the EPR program, “misses the target” in terms of encouraging a circular economy and modernizing the state’s recycling program. “Unfortunately, as enacted, the act and threatens the viability of the wholesale distribution industry nationwide—the cornerstone of America’s supply chain,” the organization says.
“While NAW supports the goal of a circular economy, the Oregon EPR law, as enacted, is unconstitutional, creates new mandates, inhibits interstate commerce and fails at its primary goal of encouraging circularity,” says Eric Hoplin, president and CEO of NAW.
“Rather than encourage sustainability through a uniform and transparent system where compliance burdens are shared across industries, Oregon chose to shift the burden to the parts of the supply chain that have little to no control over decisions to design, reduce, reuse or recycle a product,” Hoplin adds.
NAW says its suit challenges the Oregon law’s constitutionally on several fronts, including that it “unfairly targets out-of-state producers [and] tries to control business outside of Oregon—violating the U.S. Constitution’s limits on state regulation of interstate commerce.”
The Oregon EPR system also “mandates [that] producers sign contracts with a single approved private organization (the Circular Action Alliance, or CAA), giving up their economic freedom and due process rights,” according to NAW.
NAW also describes the CAA as a private, third-party group “with a financial interest in the program” it claims is operating “without clear rules or oversight.”
As an example, NAW says CAA policies subject product makers and distributors “to fees and rules set by CAA without a real chance to object or appeal or transparency in the process.”
In the closing section of its 23-page filing, NAW says it is asking the court to “declare the act and regulations promulgated thereunder to be invalid and unenforceable” and “issue a permanent injunction enjoining defendants from implementing or enforcing the act and regulations promulgated thereunder.”
Additionally, NAW has asked the court to award it “such costs of suit and attorney’s fees to which plaintiff may be entitled to by law” and to “award such other relief as the court deems just and proper.”