A federal judge upheld Oregon’s 2021 recycling law, calling it innovative and rejecting claims by the wholesale-distribution industry that it violated federal law or interfered with interstate commerce. The law was drafted and approved to advance Oregon’s policy goal of shifting its recycling costs from governmental entities to producers, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon wrote in a 71-page ruling.
The decision followed a five-day trial before the judge in mid-July. Simon quoted from a 1932 dissent by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who wrote that to pause “experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility.” Simon also cited a more recent 2023 ruling in a case that held that companies that choose to sell products in various states “must normally comply with the laws of those various states.”
Under Oregon’s Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act, the state “continues to show innovative leadership toward solving serious local, national, and even international problems caused by plastic and other forms of waste and packaging pollution,” Simon wrote. The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, a trade organization representing an $8.6 trillion industry, sued the state Department of Environmental Quality in 2025, arguing that its recycling law imposed arbitrary and excessive fees on businesses and interfered with interstate commerce.