Engineering-grade data prep for state packaging EPR.

Producer Ledger was founded by Alexander Benderski, bringing a background in software architecture and data systems to extended producer responsibility. We help growing consumer brands turn fragmented supplier records, product catalogs, and sales reports into audit-ready packaging workpapers for California, Oregon, and Colorado.

Why packaging compliance is a data systems problem

When brands run into trouble with packaging EPR, the issue is rarely packaging design — products are already manufactured and sitting on retail shelves. Nor is it purely a legal question.

The real operational bottleneck is an unstructured data and provenance challenge. Packaging specifications are scattered across supplier PDF spec sheets, CAD drawings, co-packer packing slips, and internal spreadsheets. Components change mid-year without clean version records, and tare weights are rarely verified on calibrated scales.

Existing advisory models aren't structured to solve this:

• Compliance software provides an empty web portal, but assumes your data is already pristine and structured. When overseas suppliers inevitably ignore the login requests, the manual data burden falls right back on your operations team.
• Environmental law firms provide critical legal interpretations at hourly rates, but they don't clean messy CSVs, extract tare weights from technical drawings, or weigh physical samples.

Producer Ledger bridges that gap with hands-on data engineering. We ingest your raw files directly, collapse hundreds of product SKUs into genuine packaging configurations, reconcile component weights against calibrated physical samples, and map each part to state reporting categories with primary statutory citations attached.

Principal-led delivery

Producer Ledger operates as an independent, principal-led technical practice:

• Direct principal involvement: Every diagnostic, configuration map, and filing-ready deliverable is led and executed directly by Alexander Benderski. You work with an experienced technical lead on your file, not junior associates or account executives.
• Systems rigor: We treat packaging inventories with the integrity of software data pipelines: immutable source file archives, cryptographic hashing, version-controlled fee schedules, and dual mathematical reconciliations.
• Independent quality verification: Every calculation, manual category override, and top-tier fee component undergoes secondary verification against published state schedules before being presented for client sign-off.

Three things I stopped claiming

When I began developing this practice, I held several assumptions that did not survive a thorough audit of the primary statutory texts and agency rules. In the interest of intellectual honesty, here are three claims I deliberately discarded:

1. "The law requires the exact weight of every piece."It does not. State EPR statutes require reporting aggregate state supply by material category. Maintaining component-level tare records is a defensible engineering practice to survive an audit — our chosen methodology, not a direct statutory command.
2. "Most companies overpay."This claim is unsubstantiated across the broader market. The reality is more nuanced: misclassification, undocumented tare weights, and missed program-specific adjustments can alter fee obligations. We evaluate client data against published rules without making generic marketing promises.
3. "Hard-to-recycle materials always cost multiples more."Published schedules in Oregon and Colorado show significant fee variations between materials, but they do not follow a simple, universal ratio. We compare specific categories strictly within an active schedule and program year, avoiding broad generalizations.

Get in touch

If your brand sells into California, Oregon, or Colorado and your packaging data lives across multiple inboxes, send entities, states, and one redacted spec. Messy data is the normal start.

Direct email: alex@producerledger.com