Extended producer responsibility
From Free net encyclopedia
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a strategy designed to promote the integration of environmental costs associated with products throughout their life cycles into the market price of the products (OECD 1999).
Extended producer responsibility imposes accountability over the entire life cycle of products and packaging introduced on the market. This means that firms, which manufacture, import and/or sell products and packaging, are required to be financially or physically responsible for such products after their useful life. They must either take back spent products and manage them through reuse, recycling or in energy production, or 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 (Hanisch, 2000).
EPR has been implemented in many forms, which may be classified into three major approaches:
References
Hanisch, C. (2000). Is Extended Producer Responsibility Effective?. Environ Sci Technol, 34 (7), pp.170 A-175 A.