Colorado Is Double-Charging Oil Packaging

Tyreese: Look, I know what you are thinking when you hear the words packaging law. You are thinking, that is not my job. I change oil. I run a truck. I take care of customers. I do not sit around reading state recycling statutes.

Tyreese: Here is the thing, though. This one found its way onto your price sheet anyway. And that is why I am talking about it today.

Tyreese: On Friday, October sixteenth, the Auto Care Association went into federal court in Colorado over the state's producer responsibility law for recycling. Now, I am going to translate that into plain English, because the legal name sounds like something designed to make you stop listening. Producer responsibility just means the company that makes or sells a packaged product has to help pay for recycling that packaging. The bottle, the jug, the box it ships in. Somebody has to pay to deal with it after the customer is done with it, and Colorado said, fine, the producers pay.

Tyreese: That part, on its own, I can understand. We all deal with used oil and used filters and empty jugs every single day. Somebody has to handle the back end of this business. What the Auto Care Association is fighting is not the idea of recycling. It is the fact that in Colorado, lubricant and petroleum companies are being told to pay twice for the same product.

Tyreese: Here is how it works, and I want you to picture this, because it is almost funny until you see the bill. Take a jug of diesel exhaust fluid. It is a plastic jug, and it ships inside a cardboard box. In Colorado, that company is being told to report the plastic jug to one organization, and the cardboard box around that same jug to a second organization. Two registrations. Two reporting portals. Two sets of deadlines. Two fee schedules. Two audits. One product.

Tyreese: The two organizations are called Circular Action Alliance and the Lubricants Packaging Management Association, which goes by Interchange Three Sixty. The first one handles most packaging in Colorado. The second one was approved for packaging tied to petroleum and automotive products. And according to the filing, the state told at least one company straight up that it has to report and pay both of them.

Tyreese: Now, let us talk numbers, because this is where it stops being abstract. One member company told the court it paid more than five hundred seventy-five thousand dollars to those two organizations in Colorado alone. That is on top of roughly three hundred ninety thousand dollars in consultant and software costs just to keep up with the paperwork. Another member said it was invoiced more than three hundred fifty thousand dollars by one organization, and it expects the other organization's fees to go past five hundred thousand dollars.

Tyreese: And then, in October, Interchange Three Sixty told producers it was changing how it calculates fees, and in many cases those fees tripled. Tripled. With no producer input, according to the association. So you are not just paying twice. You are paying twice, and one of the bills just jumped, and you do not get a vote on it.

Tyreese: I want to be straight with you about where I sit on this. I run my trucks in the Philly area. I do not sell packaged products into Colorado. This is not my state law. I am not a lawyer, and I am not going to pretend I read all forty-five pages of that court filing line by line. But here is why I still care, and why you should too, even if you have never been west of Ohio.

Tyreese: First, these companies do not price state by state. The lawyers who wrote about this case said it plainly. These members negotiate national pricing, and they cannot isolate what Colorado costs them. So a cost that starts in Colorado does not stay in Colorado. It gets spread out. It shows up in a price sheet in Pennsylvania, in New Jersey, in Delaware, in places that never passed a law like this. You and I end up helping pay for a Colorado compliance system we never voted on, through a line item nobody explains to us.

Tyreese: Second, this is a preview. Colorado is not the only state doing this. Oregon and California have similar programs, and they use the same main organization, Circular Action Alliance. Other states are watching. When a state figures out it can hand this job to private organizations, with their own fee schedules and their own rules, and those organizations start multiplying, that model travels. Today it is two organizations in Colorado. The association warns that more program administrators could be approved, and each one would mean another registration, another format, another audit. That is the direction this is heading if nobody pushes back.

Tyreese: Now, let us talk about who this hits hardest, because it is not everybody equally. The big chains and the big national retailers, they have compliance departments. They have lawyers. They have software. They grumble about the cost, they pass it through, and they keep moving. The association says more than two hundred of its members are mid-sized companies. Big enough that they do not qualify for the small business exemption, but not big enough to have a compliance department sitting around waiting for this. That is the gap where independents live. That is where most of us live. We do not have a compliance department. We have a dispatcher, a couple of techs, and a price sheet that went up again with no explanation.

Tyreese: And that brings me to the part that matters for a guy running trucks. When your oil supplier raises prices, they rarely send you a note that says, hey, Colorado packaging fees went up, so here is your share. They just raise the price. A few cents here, a few dollars a case there. And if you are not watching, you eat it. Your margin shrinks a little every month, and you cannot point to why, because the reason is buried three layers deep in somebody else's compliance bill.

Tyreese: So what do we do about it? I am not telling you to file a lawsuit. I am not telling you to become an expert on recycling law. I am telling you to do one thing this week, and it will take you about ten minutes.

Tyreese: Call or email your oil distributor, or your main supplier, whoever sends you your price sheet. Ask them one direct question. Are any packaging compliance fees, recycling fees, or state program surcharges showing up in my pricing, and if so, which states are they coming from? That is it. Do not argue. Do not threaten to switch suppliers. Just ask, and write down the answer.

Tyreese: Here is why that matters. If they say no, great, you learned something, and you have a baseline. If they say yes, or if they say, well, it is baked into the national price, then you have just found a cost driver that most operators never see. And once you see it, you can do something about it. You can decide whether to pass it through in your own pricing. You can decide whether to ask for a breakdown on your next order. You can decide whether to bring it up with your fleet customers, who respect you more when you can explain why a price moved instead of just handing them a higher number and shrugging.

Tyreese: And if you run a fleet account, that conversation matters even more. Fleet managers hate surprises. If you can say, look, part of this increase is a compliance cost coming out of a state program, and here is what changed, you sound like an operator who watches his numbers. If you cannot explain it, you sound like a guy who just raises prices because he can.

Tyreese: One more honest note before I wrap this up. This lawsuit does not pause anything. The lawyers were clear about that. While the case moves through court, the obligations stay in place. Nobody has been relieved of either set of fees. So do not wait for a court to fix your price sheet. The court case might take months or longer, and in the meantime, the bills keep coming. That is exactly why the ten-minute question matters now, not later.

Tyreese: So here is my takeaway for this week. Costs do not always arrive as a big announcement. Sometimes they arrive quietly, buried in a supplier's national price, wearing a name you have never heard of, from a state you do not operate in. The operators who survive are the ones who ask where the money is going before the margin is gone.

Tyreese: Ask your supplier about packaging fees this week. Write down the answer. Then run your numbers with real information instead of guesses.

Tyreese: That is it for today. Go check your price sheet, go take care of your customers, and I will talk to you tomorrow.