Over the last generation, a remarkable and enduring grassroots effort has resulted in a large recycling, composting and reuse sector based on decentralized collection and processing. Currently over 10,000 local governments have recycling programs. Over 65,000 businesses in the recycling collection and processing sector employ more than one million workers and have sales approaching $300 billion. Local activists, through years of painstaking (and sometimes heartbreaking) work, transformed solid waste management from an unsustainable ‘burn and bury’ paradigm to one of local sustainable recycling coupled with economic development. Organized citizens accomplished this by defeating 300 planned incinerators and, in the process, changing the rules to favor recycling through a variety of policies (e.g. Pay-as-You-Throw, container deposit laws, mandatory household and commercial recycling, minimum content requirements, and yard debris and electronic scrap and toxic materials disposal bans.) In the last few years a new paradigm has emerged and gained traction: extended producer responsibility (EPR). As the name implies, EPR extends the responsibility of manufacturers to include recovery of their products and/or financial responsibility for related public expenditures. The promotion of EPR is ubiquitous, including, at least one academic book, a series of articles in Forbes Magazine, conference workshops, and a webinar series. To use the current phrase in vogue, the new EPR intends to “reinvent recycling.”