Extended Producer Responsibility

Millions of tons of post-consumer packaging enter our municipal solid waste management systems each year. While some is recycled, most is incinerated or buried in landfills. This volume of waste results in environmental harm and injustice, excess costs to taxpayers and potentially valuable recycling materials wasted. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) (also referred to as product stewardship) ensures packaging producers assume responsibility for the cost of collecting and sorting recyclables at end of life. Producers internalize these costs by incorporating them into the price of new products. This creates an incentive to design better and identify opportunities for efficiency in the recycling system to reduce costs, leading to an increase in recycling. EPR is a strategy to add all of the environmental costs associated with a product throughout the product life cycle to the market price of that product.

Plastic pollution is a global crisis causing extensive public health and ecological adversities. Single-use plastics are the most pervasive plastic pollutants that contain hazardous substances and that slowly break down into smaller particles that stay in the environment. Plastic is largely made from fossil fuels, and production is expected to increase by more than 30% over the next decade. At a current national recycling rate of 5%, recycling won’t ever be able to keep pace with the production or generation of single-use plastics. Many policies currently focus on how to manage waste once generated. But to address the full extent of the plastic pollution crisis, comprehensive policy strategies are needed that account for the full life cycle of plastics and remediate the problem upstream where it’s created.