What is EPR?
Quite simply, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) means manufacturers/producers take primary responsibility for the End-of-Life (EOL) of the products they create. Producers make the decisions over how products are designed and what they are made of, which ultimately determine the cost to manage at EOL, therefore, they have the primary responsibility for EOL management.
Does EPR Affect Green Design?
EPR drives innovative, thoughtful green design and self-sustaining collection and take-back systems that work for consumers.
Take for example, the Brita water filtration pitcher, which is designed differently in the U.S. than in Europe. Why? Because the filters must be designed for recycling in Europe, but not in the U.S. Same product - different design. Thanks to a grassroots campaign called Take Back the Filter, the Clorox company (Brita brand owner) has started a recycling program for their filters in some U.S. markets.
Involving producers and manufacturers in EPR drives better design because when a company knows they will be responsible for a product when it's time to dispose it, they will make sure it's designed in a way to reduce those EOL costs. Take a look at some compelling evidence:
- Swimming Upstream: Product Stewardship and the Promise of Green Design
White Paper by David Stitzhal of Full Circle Consulting 6/10
Oregon DEQ Product Stewardship Stakeholder Group
Product‐oriented policies reflect an awareness of – and an attempt to address – the impacts products have at end of life, as well as throughout the product’s life‐cycle. Ideally, such product stewardship policies establish built‐in mechanisms and incentives that minimize environmental impact at time of disposal, as well as during design, production, transport and other life‐cycle stages. This is often achieved by building the costs of such impacts into the consumer‐manufacturer transaction, rather than covering such costs through solid waste rates and taxes.
It is critical to producers to establish a level regulatory playing fields, thus allowing industry to compete on improving their environmental footprint, rather than simply cost and performance. These mechanisms rely on different engines, ranging from leveraging purchasing power (EPEAT, Top Runner) to restricting materials (RoHS, food service packaging), to requiring manufacturer take-back (Paint, EWaste). These approaches provide lessons and experience from which Oregon can draw when exploring continued product‐oriented policies as a tool for decreasing waste and toxicity in the State. Several lessons and policy recommendations are suggested.
- How Producer Responsibility for Product Take-Back Can Promote Eco-Design —Clean Production Action, 3/08
- TV Producers Double Standards —Computer TakeBack Campaign
- EPR and Eco-Design —Lund University, Sweden 2006
What is Individual Producer Responsibility?
CPSC and other product stewardship councils have adopted the principles of product stewardship policy that states the following:
“Producers have flexibility to meet these responsibilities by offering their own plan or participating in a plan with others.” This is an important key in EPR to allow individual producers who do a great job of green design to benefit exclusively from that effort by designing a program to take back their products directly instead of joining with other producers of similar products for a collective take-back system.
Does EPR Create Jobs?
EPR absolutely drives the creation of green jobs. In California, just 30 days after the carpet EPR legislation passed, one carpet company announced they created 100 jobs. There were at least two other recycling companies looking for locations to build recovery plants in California. Europe and Canada have had EPR systems in place for decades and have seen the upward trend toward job creation as a result of their EPR programs. You can read more about green jobs below:
Who Supports EPR?
There is broad-based support for EPR locally, throughout California, nationally and internationally. More importantly, representatives from all sides are taking part in on-going EPR discussions: manufacturers, retailers, local government, retail associations, public health and environmental health organizations, water and waste water organizations, non-government organizations, and the general public.
CPSC provides ongoing outreach, education and technical assistance to all of these groups to bring these stakeholders together, make sure their interests are identified and addressed, and to build a coalition that will bring EPR to California.
EPR or Advanced Recycling Fees?
The Advanced Recycling Fee (ARF), sometimes called Advanced Disposal Fee (ADF), is an up-front fee that is paid when you buy a product, to help fund the eventual disposal of the product at the end of life. In California, we have ARFs for electronics with a certain size screen display, including televisions, laptops, computer monitors and portable DVD players. The problem with this ADF is that it does nothing to reduce the amount of waste produced or the toxicity of the waste. After all, it's the consumer who pays the ARF. There's no cost at all to the producer because they're not required to take responsibility for the product they've created once it leaves their warehouses; therefore, there's no incentive to design a more eco-friendly product. In addition, the collection of ADFs and the eventual re-distribution to government agencies and "approved recyclers" has created another costly bureaucracy. Read more on ADF versus EPR in the following documents:
Questions and Answers about ARF vs EPR —Computer TakeBack Campaign
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