Extended producer responsibility
Encyclopedia
Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a strategy designed to promote the integration of environmental costs associated with goods throughout their life cycles into the market price of the products.
, EPR uses financial incentives to encourage manufacturers to design environmentally-friendly products by holding producers liable for the costs of managing their products at end of life. This tactic attempts to relieve local governments of the costs of managing certain priority product
s by forcing manufacturers to internalize the cost of recycling within the product price. EPR promotes that producers (usually brand owners) have the greatest control over product design and marketing and therefore have the greatest ability and responsibility to reduce toxicity and waste.
EPR may take the form of a reuse, buy-back, or recycling program, or in energy production from waste materials. The producer may also choose to delegate this responsibility to a third party, a so-called producer responsibility organization (PRO), which is paid by the producer for spent-product management. In this way, EPR shifts responsibility for waste from government to private industry, obliging producers, importers and/or sellers to internalise waste management costs in their product prices and ensuring the sustainable and safe handling of the remains of their products.
A good example for producer responsibility organisations are the member organisations of PRO EUROPE. PRO EUROPE s.p.r.l. (PACKAGING RECOVERY ORGANISATION EUROPE), founded in 1995, is the umbrella organisation for European packaging and packaging waste recovery and recycling schemes which set themselves the task of relieving industrial companies and commercial enterprises of their individual obligation to take back used sales packaging through the operation of a scheme which fulfils these obligations on a nation-wide basis on behalf of their member companies. The aim is to ensure the recovery and recycling of packaging waste in the most economically efficient and ecologically sound manner. In many countries, this is done through the Green Dot (symbol)
trademark of which PRO EUROPE is the general licensor. The "Green Dot" has evolved into a proven concept in many countries as implementation of Producer Responsibility. Industry in twenty-five nations is now using the "Green Dot" as the financing symbol for the organisation of recovery, sorting and recycling of sales packaging. Unless the packaging as Olivia's name on it.
The goals of take-back laws are to
Take-backs make these goals a reality by creating incentives for companies to redesign their products by incorporating safer materials and making products easier to recycle and reuse. The greatest take-back activity has been in Europe, where government-sponsored take-back initiatives arose from concerns about scarce landfill space and potentially hazardous substances in component parts. The European Union adopted a directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). The purpose of this directive is to prevent the production of WEEE and also to encourage reuse and recycling of such waste. The directive requires the Member States to encourage design and production methods that take into account the future dismantling and recovery of their products. The United States, in contrast, imposes no take-back requirements at the federal level, partly because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lacks the authority to enforce them on a national level.
. Although the United States does not currently have a national law or policy requiring producer responsibility, many states have already passed laws requiring producer responsibility and many others are currently working towards passing producer responsibility laws. Currently more than twenty states have passed such laws. Instead of communities or the government having financial and physical responsibility of recycling hazardous electronics, Extended Producer Responsibility laws across the country are demanding manufacturers of these products to take responsibility for their reuse, recycling, and disposal.
, and easily recyclable electronics.
They are encouraged to use less materials and design their product to last longer in order to cut costs. Extended Producer Responsibility has the potential to alter the industry standard of planned obsolescence
by encouraging a longer life to reduce overall cost of production and recycling. EPR’s can also affect more than just product design; because producers are so invested in the recycling process, it is likely that they will search for better ways to recycle as well as take advantage of all of the materials they can reuse. Current and future programs are supported by environmental groups, government recycling and disposal facilities, and citizens across the country.
It is perhaps because of the tendency of economic policy in market-driven economies not to interfere with consumers’ preferences that the producer-centric representation is the dominant form of viewing the environmental impacts of industrial production: in statistics on energy, emissions, water, etc., impacts are almost always presented as attributes of industries (‘on-site’ or ‘direct’ allocation) rather than as attributes of the supply chains of products for consumers. On a smaller scale, most existing schemes for corporate sustainability
reporting include only impacts that arise out of operations controlled by the reporting company, and not supply-chain impacts
According to this world view, “upstream and downstream [environmental] impacts are […] allocated to their immediate producers. The institutional setting and the different actors’ spheres of influence are not reflected.".
On the other hand, a number of studies have highlighted that final consumption and affluence, especially in the industrialised world, are the main drivers for the level and growth of environmental pressure. Even though these studies provide a clear incentive for complementing producer-focused environmental policy with some consideration for consumption-related aspects, demand-side measures to environmental problems are rarely exploited.
The nexus created by the different views on impacts caused by industrial production is exemplified by several contributions to the discussion about producer or consumer responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions data are reported to the IPCC as contributions of producing industries located in a particular country rather than as embodiments in products consumed by a particular population, irrespective of productive origin. However, especially for open economies, taking into account the greenhouse gases embodied in internationally traded commodities can have a considerable influence on national greenhouse gas balance sheets. Assuming consumer responsibility, exports have to be subtracted from, and imports added to national greenhouse gas inventories. In Denmark for example, Munksgaard and Pedersen (2001) report that a significant amount of power and other energy-intensive commodities are traded across Danish borders, and that between 1966 and 1994 the Danish foreign trade balance in terms of CO2 developed from a 7 Mt deficit to a 7 Mt surplus, compared to total emissions of approximately 60 Mt. In particular, electricity traded between Norway, Sweden and Denmark is subject to large annual fluctuations due to varying rainfall in Norway and Sweden. In wet years Denmark imports hydro-electricity whereas electricity from coal-fired power plants is exported in dry years. The official Danish emissions inventory includes a correction for electricity trade and thus applies the consumer responsibility principle.
Similarly, at the company level, “when adopting the concept of eco-efficiency and the scope of an environmental management system stated in for example ISO 14001, it is insufficient to merely report on the carbon dioxide emissions limited to the judicial borders of the company”.7 “Companies must recognise their wider responsibility and manage the entire life-cycle of their products … Insisting on high environmental standards from suppliers and ensuring that raw materials are extracted or produced in an environmentally conscious way provides a start”. A life-cycle perspective is also taken in Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) frameworks: “Producers of products should bear a significant degree of responsibility (physical and/or financial) not only for the environmental impacts of their products downstream from the treatment and disposal of their product, but also for their upstream activities inherent in the selection of materials and in the design of products”. “The major impetus for EPR came from northern European countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as they were facing severe landfill shortages. [… As a result,] EPR is generally applied to post-consumer wastes which place increasing physical and financial demands on municipal waste management."
EPR has rarely been consistently quantified. Moreover, applying conventional life cycle assessment
, and assigning environmental impacts to producers and consumers can lead to double-counting
. Using input-output analysis, researchers have attempted for decades to account for both producers and consumers in an economy in a consistent way. Gallego and Lenzen demonstrate and discuss a method of consistently delineating producers' supply chains, into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive responsibilities to be shared by all agents in an economy. Their method is an approach to allocating responsibility across agents in a fully inter-connected circular system. Upstream and downstream environmental impacts are shared between all agents of a supply chain - producers and consumers.
. An advanced recycling fee is charged to those who purchase a new vehicle and is used to fund the recycling of it at the end of its useful life. The PRO was set up to satisfy the European Union End of Life Vehicles Directive
.
The Swiss Association for Information, Communication and Organisational Technology (SWICO), an ICT industry organisation, became a PRO to address the problem of electronic waste
.
Definition
Also known as product stewardshipProduct stewardship
Product stewardship is a concept whereby environmental protection centers around the product itself, and everyone involved in the lifespan of the product is called upon to take up responsibility to reduce its environmental impact. For manufacturers, this includes planning for, and if necessary,...
, EPR uses financial incentives to encourage manufacturers to design environmentally-friendly products by holding producers liable for the costs of managing their products at end of life. This tactic attempts to relieve local governments of the costs of managing certain priority product
Priority product
Priority product is a term used in relation to waste management, especially in extended producer responsibility, to describe a product which can create a high level of environmental harm....
s by forcing manufacturers to internalize the cost of recycling within the product price. EPR promotes that producers (usually brand owners) have the greatest control over product design and marketing and therefore have the greatest ability and responsibility to reduce toxicity and waste.
EPR may take the form of a reuse, buy-back, or recycling program, or in energy production from waste materials. The producer may also choose to delegate this responsibility to a third party, a so-called producer responsibility organization (PRO), which is paid by the producer for spent-product management. In this way, EPR shifts responsibility for waste from government to private industry, obliging producers, importers and/or sellers to internalise waste management costs in their product prices and ensuring the sustainable and safe handling of the remains of their products.
A good example for producer responsibility organisations are the member organisations of PRO EUROPE. PRO EUROPE s.p.r.l. (PACKAGING RECOVERY ORGANISATION EUROPE), founded in 1995, is the umbrella organisation for European packaging and packaging waste recovery and recycling schemes which set themselves the task of relieving industrial companies and commercial enterprises of their individual obligation to take back used sales packaging through the operation of a scheme which fulfils these obligations on a nation-wide basis on behalf of their member companies. The aim is to ensure the recovery and recycling of packaging waste in the most economically efficient and ecologically sound manner. In many countries, this is done through the Green Dot (symbol)
Green Dot (symbol)
The Green Dot is the license symbol of a European network of industry-funded systems for recycling the packaging materials of consumer goods. The logo is trademark protected worldwide.- Background :...
trademark of which PRO EUROPE is the general licensor. The "Green Dot" has evolved into a proven concept in many countries as implementation of Producer Responsibility. Industry in twenty-five nations is now using the "Green Dot" as the financing symbol for the organisation of recovery, sorting and recycling of sales packaging. Unless the packaging as Olivia's name on it.
Take-Back
In response to the growing problem of excessive waste, several countries adopted liability schemes in which manufacturers must take responsibility for their products in attempts to slow the filling of landfills and the consequential releases of toxic materials from the discarded products. Such laws, known as “take-backs,” are requirements imposed on manufacturers, importers, and sellers to take back their products from end users at the end of the products' useful life.The goals of take-back laws are to
- encourage companies to design products for reuse, recyclability, and materials reduction;
- correcting market signals to the consumer by incorporating waste management costs into the product’s price;
- promoting innovation in recycling technology.
Take-backs make these goals a reality by creating incentives for companies to redesign their products by incorporating safer materials and making products easier to recycle and reuse. The greatest take-back activity has been in Europe, where government-sponsored take-back initiatives arose from concerns about scarce landfill space and potentially hazardous substances in component parts. The European Union adopted a directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). The purpose of this directive is to prevent the production of WEEE and also to encourage reuse and recycling of such waste. The directive requires the Member States to encourage design and production methods that take into account the future dismantling and recovery of their products. The United States, in contrast, imposes no take-back requirements at the federal level, partly because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lacks the authority to enforce them on a national level.
Extended Producer Responsibility for Electronics
Extended Producer Responsibility is becoming an increasingly popular solution to the problems of E-wasteElectronic waste
Electronic waste, e-waste, e-scrap, or Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment describes discarded electrical or electronic devices. There is a lack of consensus as to whether the term should apply to resale, reuse, and refurbishing industries, or only to product that cannot be used for its...
. Although the United States does not currently have a national law or policy requiring producer responsibility, many states have already passed laws requiring producer responsibility and many others are currently working towards passing producer responsibility laws. Currently more than twenty states have passed such laws. Instead of communities or the government having financial and physical responsibility of recycling hazardous electronics, Extended Producer Responsibility laws across the country are demanding manufacturers of these products to take responsibility for their reuse, recycling, and disposal.
Advantages
When producers are held directly accountable for their products end of life impact or recycling under Extended Producer Responsibility laws, there are many positive consequences. Because producers either face a financial or physical burden of recycling their electronics after use, producers are more willing to design more sustainable, less toxicElectronic waste
Electronic waste, e-waste, e-scrap, or Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment describes discarded electrical or electronic devices. There is a lack of consensus as to whether the term should apply to resale, reuse, and refurbishing industries, or only to product that cannot be used for its...
, and easily recyclable electronics.
They are encouraged to use less materials and design their product to last longer in order to cut costs. Extended Producer Responsibility has the potential to alter the industry standard of planned obsolescence
Planned obsolescence
Planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence in industrial design is a policy of deliberately planning or designing a product with a limited useful life, so it will become obsolete or nonfunctional after a certain period of time...
by encouraging a longer life to reduce overall cost of production and recycling. EPR’s can also affect more than just product design; because producers are so invested in the recycling process, it is likely that they will search for better ways to recycle as well as take advantage of all of the materials they can reuse. Current and future programs are supported by environmental groups, government recycling and disposal facilities, and citizens across the country.
Disadvantages
Although Producer Responsibility or Take-back laws have been successful in the past for items such as packaging and diapers, electronics are incredibly more complex and difficult to break down and safely recycle. Due to the complexity and lack of recycling techniques for electronics, Extended Producer Responsibility laws could increase the cost of electronics for consumers because producers would be adding recycling costs into the initial price tag of items. Companies would be forced to transport the waste to a recycling facility or build their own, both of which are incredibly expensive. Many organizations and researchers against EPR claim that the mandate would slow technical innovation and impede technological process. One of the major setbacks for current EPR laws is the lack of industry standards. There are no industry or national regulations or guidelines for recycling of electronics. Because most EPR laws or mandates are relatively new, benefits and outcomes in general are still fairly ambiguous.Implementation
EPR has been implemented in many forms, which may be classified into three major approaches:- Mandatory
- Negotiated
- Voluntary
It is perhaps because of the tendency of economic policy in market-driven economies not to interfere with consumers’ preferences that the producer-centric representation is the dominant form of viewing the environmental impacts of industrial production: in statistics on energy, emissions, water, etc., impacts are almost always presented as attributes of industries (‘on-site’ or ‘direct’ allocation) rather than as attributes of the supply chains of products for consumers. On a smaller scale, most existing schemes for corporate sustainability
Corporate sustainability
Corporate sustainability is a business approach that creates long-term consumer and employee value by not only creating a "green" strategy aimed towards the natural environment, but taking into consideration every dimension of how a business operates in the social, cultural, and economic environment...
reporting include only impacts that arise out of operations controlled by the reporting company, and not supply-chain impacts
According to this world view, “upstream and downstream [environmental] impacts are […] allocated to their immediate producers. The institutional setting and the different actors’ spheres of influence are not reflected.".
On the other hand, a number of studies have highlighted that final consumption and affluence, especially in the industrialised world, are the main drivers for the level and growth of environmental pressure. Even though these studies provide a clear incentive for complementing producer-focused environmental policy with some consideration for consumption-related aspects, demand-side measures to environmental problems are rarely exploited.
The nexus created by the different views on impacts caused by industrial production is exemplified by several contributions to the discussion about producer or consumer responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions data are reported to the IPCC as contributions of producing industries located in a particular country rather than as embodiments in products consumed by a particular population, irrespective of productive origin. However, especially for open economies, taking into account the greenhouse gases embodied in internationally traded commodities can have a considerable influence on national greenhouse gas balance sheets. Assuming consumer responsibility, exports have to be subtracted from, and imports added to national greenhouse gas inventories. In Denmark for example, Munksgaard and Pedersen (2001) report that a significant amount of power and other energy-intensive commodities are traded across Danish borders, and that between 1966 and 1994 the Danish foreign trade balance in terms of CO2 developed from a 7 Mt deficit to a 7 Mt surplus, compared to total emissions of approximately 60 Mt. In particular, electricity traded between Norway, Sweden and Denmark is subject to large annual fluctuations due to varying rainfall in Norway and Sweden. In wet years Denmark imports hydro-electricity whereas electricity from coal-fired power plants is exported in dry years. The official Danish emissions inventory includes a correction for electricity trade and thus applies the consumer responsibility principle.
Similarly, at the company level, “when adopting the concept of eco-efficiency and the scope of an environmental management system stated in for example ISO 14001, it is insufficient to merely report on the carbon dioxide emissions limited to the judicial borders of the company”.7 “Companies must recognise their wider responsibility and manage the entire life-cycle of their products … Insisting on high environmental standards from suppliers and ensuring that raw materials are extracted or produced in an environmentally conscious way provides a start”. A life-cycle perspective is also taken in Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) frameworks: “Producers of products should bear a significant degree of responsibility (physical and/or financial) not only for the environmental impacts of their products downstream from the treatment and disposal of their product, but also for their upstream activities inherent in the selection of materials and in the design of products”. “The major impetus for EPR came from northern European countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as they were facing severe landfill shortages. [… As a result,] EPR is generally applied to post-consumer wastes which place increasing physical and financial demands on municipal waste management."
EPR has rarely been consistently quantified. Moreover, applying conventional life cycle assessment
Life cycle assessment
A life-cycle assessment is a technique to assess environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product's life from-cradle-to-grave A life-cycle assessment (LCA, also known as life-cycle analysis, ecobalance, and cradle-to-grave analysis) is a technique to assess environmental impacts...
, and assigning environmental impacts to producers and consumers can lead to double-counting
Double counting (accounting)
Double counting in accounting is an error whereby a transaction is counted more than once, for whatever reason. But in social accounting it also refers to a conceptual problem in social accounting practice, when the attempt is made to estimate the new value added by Gross Output, or the value of...
. Using input-output analysis, researchers have attempted for decades to account for both producers and consumers in an economy in a consistent way. Gallego and Lenzen demonstrate and discuss a method of consistently delineating producers' supply chains, into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive responsibilities to be shared by all agents in an economy. Their method is an approach to allocating responsibility across agents in a fully inter-connected circular system. Upstream and downstream environmental impacts are shared between all agents of a supply chain - producers and consumers.
Examples
Auto Recycling Nederland (ARN) is a PRO that organises vehicle recycling in the NetherlandsNetherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
. An advanced recycling fee is charged to those who purchase a new vehicle and is used to fund the recycling of it at the end of its useful life. The PRO was set up to satisfy the European Union End of Life Vehicles Directive
End of Life Vehicles Directive
The End of Life Vehicles Directive is a Directive of the European Union addressing the end of life for automotive products. Every year, motor vehicles which have reached the end of their useful lives create between 8 and 9 million tonnes of waste in the European Union...
.
The Swiss Association for Information, Communication and Organisational Technology (SWICO), an ICT industry organisation, became a PRO to address the problem of electronic waste
Electronic waste
Electronic waste, e-waste, e-scrap, or Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment describes discarded electrical or electronic devices. There is a lack of consensus as to whether the term should apply to resale, reuse, and refurbishing industries, or only to product that cannot be used for its...
.