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.

EPR Programmes: Individual versus Collective Responsibility Exploring various forms of implementation and their implication to design change

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Conditions and constraints for waste management : collection, characterisation and producer responsibility in Sweden

Abstract: Waste management has changed from being mainly a question of transporting out of sight to being an issue entwined in all parts of society, from product planning to the private domestic sphere. This has imposed new conditions and constraints for waste management, the description of which is the objective of this thesis. The overall policy in Sweden is that all waste should be treated according to its characteristics and reincorporated into societal material flows. The main aim is to reduce the quantities of household waste generated and the amounts sent to landfill. To give waste management a broader perspective and to establish a waste hierarchy, producer responsibility legislation was introduced in Sweden in 1994. According to this, paper/newsprint and packaging waste have to be sorted at source and collected separately. Source separation is today an established part of legislation and public thinking and is probably here to stay so waste management providers must adapt to this situation. In order to obtain high participation rates in source separation programmes, they have to be designed so as to decrease any barriers to participation. The design of collection systems has many aspects since they must be both technically feasible and accepted and understood by the public. Recurring and adequate information to households are is very important for the function of the collection system, but both these and other design parameters should be adapted to local conditions. The differences in the systems used in Sweden today do not lie mainly in technical features but rather in how, why, by and for whom they were developed. To plan waste management, the characteristics of the waste must be known, due to temporal and regional variations these are best evaluated through waste component analysis. The aim of such analysis determines the level on which it should be conducted: national, regional or household level. When post-collection sampling is possible at a treatment plant, the procedure can be made more efficient and less resource-demanding. The methods for waste component analysis presented in this thesis can be a useful tool in future waste management planning.

Managing Wastivity for Sustainability

Abstract: The different phases of waste management include, generation, reduction, recycling/reuse, and disposal. Out of these, the main emphasis should be on waste reduction, which will reduce the load on all subsequent phases of waste management. A sound measure of waste management effectiveness is “wastivity”, i.e. a ratio of the waste to input. From systems view point, the wastivity should take into consideration the system waste (as a holistic measure of waste of all resources) as the numerator and total systems input as the base. The management of wastivity of different types would effect all the three dimensions of sustainability, i.e. economic, environmental, and social. A sustainable enterprise, with low wastivity, will be able to attain the triple bottom line.

Simulation-based optimization of ecological leasing: a step toward extended producer responsibility (EPR).

Abstract: In recent years, due to severe environmental legislations and extended producer responsibility, leasing has been recommended as a strategy for increasing resources productivity and minimizing waste generation during consumption and product end-of-life (EOL) phase. Hence, it is essential to develop a model that can help leasing company for achieving sustainable production management. In this paper, a model is developed which optimizes the environmental and economical impact of product during leasing and its EOL phase from customers and leasing company point of view. To solve the problem, simulation-based optimization approach is investigated and the integrated mathematical and simulation model is developed for incorporating uncertainty during leasing period. Finally a case study with data from industry is used to validate the approach and potential applications of the developed model are illustrated.

Efficient Waste Management Policies and Strategic Behavior with Open Borders

Abstract: During the last decade waste management has been characterized by two main trends: the growth of international trade of waste materials and the introduction of extended producer responsibility (EPR) as a policy instrument. In this paper a two-country stylized model with imperfect competition in the recycling market is used to address two research questions. First, how do EPR recycling targets interact with other policy instruments such as taxes on recycling residues and excise duties? Second, how does strategic behavior of national policy makers influences the use of policy instruments? The model demonstrates that a combination of EPR with other instruments is needed to achieve the first-best outcome. When governments do not coordinate policies across borders, strategic behavior may lead to a ‘race to the bottom’ for taxes on recycling residues. Conversely, strategic behavior may lead to a counter-intuitive ‘race to the top’ for excise duties and EPR recycling targets. It is shown that these instruments are not only used to stimulate waste prevention but also to extract rents from foreign recyclers.