Spring 1999
Strategies for Extended Producer Responsibility
from a paper by Bev Thorpe and Iza Kruszewska
Current industrial production systems are not compatible with the earth’s ecosystem. Resources are consumed unsustainably, processed inefficiently into often superfluous, disposable products and then dumped as waste. The use of toxic and hazardous materials in production processes results in dangerous emissions, by-products and ingredients in final products. Hazardous waste treatment technologies, such as incineration, cause air pollution as well as soil and groundwater pollution when incinerator ash is dumped.
The transition to Clean Production will rely increasingly on smaller and cleaner material, water and energy flows. The speed and volume of resources flowing through production-consumption cycles can be reduced by improved product design that allows for re-use of components and materials recycling. A better choice of materials that favors the use of non-hazardous substances in production processes will result in cleaner and safer products.
I. What is Extended Producer Responsibility
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is an emerging principle for a new generation of pollution prevention policies that focus on product systems instead of production facilities.
The aim of EPR is to encourage producers to prevent pollution and reduce resource and energy use in each stage of the product life-cycle through changes in product design and process technology. In its widest sense, Producer Responsibility is the principle that producers bear a degree of responsibility of all the environmental impacts of their products. This includes upstream impacts arising from the choice of materials and from the manufacturing process and downstream impacts, from the use and disposal of products. Producers accept their responsibility when they accept legal, physical or economic responsibility for the environmental impacts that cannot be eliminated by design.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) focuses on the responsibility that producers assume for their products at the end of their useful life, or post-consumer stage. The model of EPR is a product take-back where a producer takes back a product at the end of its useful life (i.e. when discarded) either directly or through a third party. Other terms used are ‘take-back’, ‘product liability’ or ‘product responsibility.’
2. The Range of Responsibilities
Conceptually, the ultimate form of EPR is leasing--where the producer never terminates ownership. Many companies such as Xerox advocate leasing of their products because it gives the producer control over the entire life cycle of the product and allows them to repair and re-use components. However, this is impractical or impossible for many product categories and so other policy tools are used such as:
physical responsibility where the producer is involved in the physical management of the products, used products or the impacts of the products through development of technology or provision of services;
economic responsibility where a producer covers all or part of the costs for managing wastes at the end of a product’s life (e.g. collection, processing, treatment or disposal);
liability where responsibility for environmental damages caused by a product--in production, use, or disposal--is borne by the producer; and
informative liability where the producer is required to provide information on the product and its effects during various stages of its life cycle.
3. The Need for Extended Producer Responsibility
In the longer term, the goals of EPR are to promote the development of sustainable production-consumption systems through more efficient resource use and a drop in the consumption of resources. This can be achieved through: overall waste prevention, the use of non-toxic materials and processes; the development of closed material cycles; the development of more durable products; the development of more reusable and recyclable products; increased reuse, recycling and recovery; the transfer of waste management costs for used products onto producers consistent with the Polluter Pays Principle.
Most of the above objective can be factored into product design which is the most crucial step in determining the nature and quantity of resource use and pollution emissions throughout the products’ life cycles. The goal of EPR is to bring about better and cleaner product design--not to simply set up a recycling system.
On a more immediate level, however, EPR has been seen as a way of shifting management costs from the public sector back to the private sector. Today, responsibility for the disposal of used products rests ultimately on local government and the general taxpayer--and not on the producer.
Over 20 years of environmental regulations have focused on controlling pollution from each individual facility with no regard to pollution arising at other stages of product life cycle. Under the limited view of environmental responsibility, solid waste management has been the responsibility of the individual householder or the local government. As solid waste burdens have increased and more stringent disposal regulations have been made solid waste management more expensive, the budgets of local governments have been stretched thin, and local taxes have been increased. At the same time, the siting of solid waste facilities has become a political battleground. Local governments have been saddled with the responsibility for a problem that is not of their own making and about which they can do little on their own to prevent.
Of course, consumers also have responsibility but in the end, only the producer has ultimate choice over materials and product design. Many consumers would welcome more reusable and repairable products, but such products are less available.
An economic analysis of the implications of cradle-to-cradle product responsibility will inevitably question the feasibility of producing and selling short-life, disposable good designed for obsolescence. It will question the economic feasibility of re-processing toxic materials contained in used products and it will question the use of multiple and composite materials as well as the design of products whose components cannot be reused or the material of which they are made cannot be recycled.
Increasing the life of products through better design is pollution prevention. Doubling the utilization (or product-life) of goods cut by half the need for raw materials and energy production, and halves the amount of post-consumer waste, without a reduction in wealth or welfare. It reduces mining waste and environmental damage in extractive industries, waste in manufacturing, distribution, recycling and waste disposal by 50%. This is achievable largely with existing technology and at the same or lower price to the consumer.
Bev Thorpe and Iza Kruszewska work with Clean Production Action and are working with the Clean Computer Campaign. This is part 1 of a paper prepared for an EPR Briefing and published by Greenpeace. This paper will be continued in future editions of SVTC Action. The full paper is available at the SVTC website at: www.svtc.org/cleancc/pubs/strat.htm
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