Extended producer responsibility

About: Extended producer responsibility is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1120 publications have been published within this topic receiving 26805 citations. The topic is also known as: EPR.

International expert group on Life Cycle assessment for integrated waste management

Abstract: Managing waste sustainably requires an assessment of the environmental costs and benefits of alternative waste management practices on a more sound and objective basis. The International Expert Group on life cycle assessment for integrated waste management (IEG) is a leading group of environmental experts with an interest in using Life Cycle techniques to inform waste management decision-making. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a technique that can be used to provide information about the likely polluting emissions and predicted environmental impacts of alternative designs for products or services. LCA for waste management specifically focuses on the environmental consequences of discarding waste materials and consumer products, identifying the costs of waste collection, treatment and any potential benefit of utilising the discarded material. Through iterative examination of various treatment alternatives for wastes, LCA can help identify optimal environmental solutions for managing wastes, without risking that the choice of decisions will result in a worsening of the overall impact. The IEG holds biannual workshop-style meetings to share international knowledge in the research area and to progress research activities. The meetings consist of presentations on life cycle modeling, LCA case studies for municipalities and specific waste streams, as well as pioneering research on decision-making and interpretation. Technical matters and issues of consistency of approach are also addressed during meetings through the knowledge and research activities of members and through the invitation of guest experts to meetings. This article provides an introduction to the work of the IEG and a summary of discussions from the 11th meeting of the group.

The relationship between municipal waste diversion incentivization and recycling system performance

Abstract: This study examines the effects of municipal recycling incentivization on municipal recycling rates and program costs in Ontario, Canada. Ontario is currently one of only two jurisdictions in Canada to fund municipal waste diversion programs using an incentive-based system that allocates funding in proportion to a municipality's recycling rate performance. Packaging fees remitted by packaging producers under Ontario's shared producer responsibility model are distributed to municipalities based on three factors: relative recycling performance, program costs and adherence to recycling best practices. Using a combination of panel data collected from 223 Ontario municipalities between the periods of 2003 and 2014 and semi structured interviews with recycling stakeholders, this study aims to examine whether municipalities respond to financial incentivization by increasing total recycling or decreasing costs. The results of the statistical modeling used in this study indicate that there is no statistically significant relationship between municipal incentives, recycling rates or program costs. This suggests that Ontario's municipal recycling funding methodology fails to achieve its intended objectives, and as such, necessitates that the approach be revisited to ensure maximum waste diversion.

Recycling Infrastructure Development under Extended Producer Responsibility in Developing Economies

Abstract: To tackle the severe pollution caused by electronic waste (e‐waste), several developing countries have introduced e‐waste legislation based on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). A major challenge to implement EPR in developing countries is the lack of formal recycling infrastructure. In this paper, we study if a collective form of EPR implementation where producers may jointly invest in recycling facilities can promote their incentives to do so. We develop a Nash bargaining model that captures the decision dynamics underlying joint recycling facility investment. We show that despite its advantage in reducing producers’ fixed investment costs, joint investment in the collective system may lead to a worse recycling infrastructure development outcome than independent investment in an individual system. This can particularly happen when the collective system involves products whose recycling costs are highly differentiated. We further show that cost sharing based on the principle of Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR) may undermine the recycling infrastructure development outcome in the collective system compared to simple proportional cost sharing rules. In practice, it is generally believed that IPR leads to better design incentives than proportional cost sharing rules. Accordingly, our result indicates that there exists a tradeoff between these two cost sharing rules, and promoting recycling infrastructure development via collective systems may come at the expense of design incentives and vice versa.