S P E C I A L F E AT U R E O N E X T E N D E D P R O D U C E R R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y

Extended Producer Responsibility

National, International, and Practical Perspectives
Reid Lifset, Atalay Atasu, and Naoko Tojo

When extended producer responsibility (EPR) emerged responsibility, for the recycling of packaging, electrical and elec-
in Sweden and Germany in the early 1990s, it was seen tronic equipment (EEE), end-of-life vehicles (ELVs), and a va-
as a policy strategy that could realize several desirable riety of household hazardous wastes such as spent batteries,
and interrelated goals: creating incentives for eco-design leftover paint, and unused pharmaceuticals. While empirical
of packages and products, leveraging private sector expertise evidence indicates that the presence of EPR policy has provided
to achieve public goals, internalizing tangible influence on manufacturers to improve
the costs of waste management into “The research in this issue . . . their product design (Tojo 2004), in most cases,
product prices, and shifting the fi- provides insights into how and EPR systems have not been designed or imple-
nancial burden of waste management mented in a way that incentivizes (re)design
from municipalities and taxpayers to
why EPR has evolved into its of products to achieve environmental improve-
firms and consumers. Implicitly it also current form and how it might ment (Dempsey et al. 2010). Instead, the pri-
held the promise of increased fund- evolve further to achieve the goals mary achievement of EPR has been to fund,
ing for recycling infrastructure and a create, or expand infrastructure for postcon-
policy mechanism that could be self-
its proponents have espoused.” sumer recycling.
adjusting. EPR is of considerable interest in the field of industrial
EPR, like so many terms and concepts in environmental ecology. Because industrial ecology looks to natural systems
policy, has multiple definitions. The most commonly used em- for potential models for improvements in resource efficiency—
phasizes the shift in responsibility for end-of-life management especially to the ability of ecosystems to cycle resources with
of products and materials to producers. The definition provided little waste—there is an emphasis on “loop closing,” that is,
by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Develop- changing resource flows from linear and unidirectional to cycli-
ment (OECD 2001) in its work on EPR in the early 2000s is cal and closed. EPR is thus both resonant metaphorically with
widely used: central premises in industrial ecology and provides a mechanism
for the pursuit of at least one of these premises.
an environmental policy approach in which a producer’s re- The Journal of Industrial Ecology has thus published many
sponsibility for a product is extended to the post-consumer
research articles on EPR since its founding (e.g., Driedger 2001;
stage of a product’s life cycle. There are two related features
Mayers et al. 2005; Manomaivibool and Vassanadumrongdee
of EPR policy: (1) the shifting of responsibility (physically
and/or economically; fully or partially) upstream toward the 2011) as well as a periodic column on this topic by Lindhqvist
producer and away from municipalities, and (2) to provide and Lifset (e.g., Lindhqvist and Lifset 1997; Lifset and Lind-
incentives to producers to incorporate environmental con- hqvist 2001, 2008). The collection of articles in this special
siderations in the design of their products. feature seeks to build on that record to explore the current
state of EPR across products, jurisdictions, and approaches.
At the conceptual level, some dispute the OECD defini- Partial funding for the feature was provided by Nestle Waters
tion, arguing that EPR is meant to extend the responsibility North America (NWNA), the largest bottled water producer in
of producers not only to waste management, but also to up- North America with additional support from Reverse Logistics
stream matters of materials choice and toxics reduction. And Group Americas (RLGA). As a bottled water producer, NWNA
some argue that EPR is not a policy tool or a policy strategy, is acutely concerned about the challenge of and public concern
but a policy principle on par with such overarching concepts about recycling of the bottles used to convey its product. The
as the producer pays principle (Davis 1999). In most policy company views EPR for packaging as a potentially preferable
implementation and public discourse, however, EPR signifies approach to achieving recycling goals and is funding a variety
the assignment of responsibility for end-of-life management of of endeavors to explore the advantages and disadvantages of
products and packages to producers. the application of EPR to packaging waste and municipal solid
At the practical level, EPR has largely turned out to be a waste more generally in the United States.1 RLGA, based in
mechanism for shifting the cost, and sometimes the operational Fremont, California, provides take back and regulatory compli-
ance services for electronic products including law tracking and
© 2013 by Yale University
DOI: 10.1111/jiec.12022 setup and management of recovery systems. Neither NWNA
nor RLGA had any role in any aspect of the editorial decision
Volume 17, Number 2

162 Journal of Industrial Ecology www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jie


making in this issue, nor should any of the views expressed in
this issue be attributed to either company.
By dint of the submissions received in response to the call for
papers, articles in the issues cluster around two topics: EPR for
waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and national
and state/provincial approaches to EPR.
Extended Producer Responsibility
and Waste Electrical and Electronic
Equipment
Management of end-of-life electronics—WEEE—is one of
the most prominent uses of EPR around the world. The use of
EPR for this purpose gained that prominence when the Euro-
pean Union (EU) adopted the Directive on Waste Electrical
and Electronic Equipment in January 2003.2 Since that time,
member states of the EU and other countries and subnational
jurisdictions have debated, implemented, and struggled and ex-
perimented with the extension of producer responsibility to
manage WEEE. As it became clear that most of the EPR pro-
grams had not been implemented in a fashion that creates in-
centives for eco-design—with the exception of cases where pro-
ducers themselves engage in recycling activities—the notion of
individual producer responsibility (IPR) gained prominence.3
IPR was viewed as a return to the key premises of EPR—that is,
if responsibility for end-of-life management could be assigned
appropriately producer-by-producer rather than collectively to
groups of producers, then the long-sought design incentives
would emerge. Research on the prospects for and means of real-
izing IPR are a key theme in the articles on WEEE in this issue.
In “Implementing Individual Producer Responsibility for
Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Through Improved
Financing,” Mayers and colleagues (2013) propose a solution
to a crucial problem that can undermine the efficiency of EPR
implementation in practice: cost allocation under collective
systems. The solution they provide has the potential to help
achieve the fundamental objectives of EPR-based take-back
legislation for WEEE–classifying WEEE according to its even-
tual end-of-life treatment requirements and cost, somewhat
similar to the way costs in EPR for packaging are allocated.
With the help of a scenario-based simulation study, the au-
thors show that cost allocation models that manage financial
guarantees to account for a balance between historical and fu-
ture waste costs can help provide superior incentives for de-
sign for recycling/reuse, and enable joint financing of histori-
cal and future waste in an equitable manner under collective
systems.
In “Technical Feasibility of Radio Frequency Identification
for Individual Producer Responsibility in Waste Electronic and
Electrical Equipment Management,” O’Connell and colleagues
(2013) investigate the technological feasibility of radio fre-
quency identification (RFID) technology to achieve IPR. Using
a series of field experiments, the authors analyze whether and
how recent technological advances in RFID tag design can
help improve the feasibility of counting and/or separating waste
Lifset et al., EPR: National, International, and Practical Perspectives
E D I TO R I A L
electronics by brand. They show that current RFID technology
read rates (i.e., the percentage of successful retrievals of RFID
tag data) can be significantly higher than expected, particularly
for large household appliances and some categories of mixed
WEEE. The authors conclude that recent advances in RFID
technology can be expected to allow implementation of IPR
using RFID as long as RFID is economically feasible.
Huisman, a long time critic of IPR, presents his views in a
column, “Too Big to Fail, Too Academic to Function: Producer
Responsibility in the Global Financial and E-waste Crises” by
first drawing a provocative analogy between the global financial
and WEEE crises (Huisman 2013). He argues that the changes
in responsibility so central to EPR cannot engender the desired
design incentives because of the long product lifetimes of EEE
and the complexity of systems involved. Instead, he contends
that increasing collection and improving processing of WEEE is
more important and that design for recycling should not trump
other environmental concerns.
In “Business-to-Business Information Technology User
Practices at End-of-Life in the United Kingdom, Germany, and
France,” Peagam and colleagues (2013) provide an empirical
study targeted at (1) understanding the end-of-life characteris-
tics of business-to-business (B2B) information technology (IT)
product markets, and (2) determining the challenges associated
with the collection and recycling of such products under the
scope of EPR mandates such as the WEEE Directive of the Eu-
ropean Commission. They describe a survey of commercial users
of IT equipment in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany
regarding the users’ end-of-life management of WEEE. The au-
thors argue that their work helps fill a gap in data on B2B WEEE
management and that their findings suggest that EU WEEE pol-
icy should not look to B2B WEEE as a means of filling collection
targets in the WEEE Directive. They suggest that the presence
of third parties involved in reuse and remarketing of used B2B
equipment (e.g., charities or waste management companies)
may necessitate different end-of-life control approaches for this
category.
In “Producer Responsibility Organizations Development and
Operations: A Case Study,” Mayers and Butler (2013) present
one of the few detailed descriptions of a producer responsibil-
ity organization (PRO) in the research literature. PROs play
an important role in the implementation of EPR: they orga-
nize and/or deliver the collection and processing of end-of-life
products managed through take-back systems. In some states
and countries, PROs are consortia of companies obligated by
law to meet collection or recycling requirements. In others,
the PROs are commercial contractors servicing the obligated
companies. In their study, Mayers and Butler describe the Eu-
ropean Recycling Platform, a PRO founded by a group of elec-
tronics producers seeking more control and lower costs in the
delivery of take-back services for WEEE. They detail the orga-
nization and relationship between the service provider and its
clients, providing a revealing window into an important com-
ponent of EPR systems.
Gui and colleagues (2013) present a detailed case study
of the implementation of EPR for WEEE in the State of
163
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Washington in the United States. In “Implementing Extended
Producer Responsibility Legislation: A Multistakeholder Case
Analysis,” they take a “deep dive,” revealing the complexity of
implementing EPR and the need to go beyond a reading of the
legislation to understand what drives programmatic and envi-
ronmental outcomes. They highlight the impact of the charac-
ter of the electronics industry, long product lives, product and
producer heterogeneity, and a multiplicity of stakeholders on
those outcomes.
National, State, and Provincial
Approaches to Extended Producer
Responsibility
In “Extended Producer Responsibility in the United States:
Full Speed Ahead?” Nash and Bosso (2013) provide an infor-
mative and practical perspective on the development of EPR in
the United States. The authors’ summary of the history of EPR
in the United States, along with different stakeholder perspec-
tives and future challenges, help explain the structure of the
existing EPR legislation in the United States and its evolution.
They highlight the very limited role of the U.S. federal govern-
ment and the prominent role of the states and they describe a
collection of state EPR laws of varying scope and design. The
authors argue this creates a natural laboratory for testing the
efficacy of a range of approaches. At the same time, they point
out the limited levels of product recovery in both voluntary and
most mandatory take-back programs.
Hickle (2013), in his article “Comparative Analysis of Ex-
tended Producer Responsibility Policy in the United States and
Canada,” discusses the similarities and differences in the ap-
proaches taken on EPR-based policies in two nations in North
America using the example of EPR for WEEE. The author iden-
tifies a number of concrete differences in the development (e.g.,
the role of the central government as opposed to state/provincial
governments), design (e.g., the level of freedom given to indus-
try), as well as the implementation of EPR-based legislation
(e.g., the level of reliance on collective or individual respon-
sibility). He highlights factors contributing to the differences,
including the level of competitiveness among business actors
and differences in the role of the judiciary between national and
state/provincial governments. The author points to the poten-
tial for cross-jurisdicational learning and collaboration between
the two nations.
Tong and Yan (2013) ask what happens when EPR is trans-
planted from the developed countries where it originated to de-
veloping countries seeking to adopt “best practices.” In “From
Legal Transplants to Sustainable Transition: Extended Pro-
ducer Responsibility in Chinese Waste Electrical and Elec-
tronic Equipment Management,” they argue that China, as
a large producer and consumer of electronic products and a
destination of e-waste flows from throughout the world, is an
important and revealing test case for EPR. They maintain that
there are two important threads in policy discourse and the im-
plementation of EPR: “EPR idealism,” which aims to engender
an innovation-oriented regime, and “EPR pragmatism,” which
164 Journal of Industrial Ecology
emphasizes cost-effectiveness in practice. They employ multi-
level transition theory to characterize the complex interactions
among various agents in the evolution of the Chinese system
from a focus on innovation to one of efficiency.
In “Original Equipment Manufacturers’ Participation in
Voluntary Product Take-Back Initiatives in Brazil: Engagement
Levels, Determinants, and Deterrents,” Quariguasi Frota Neto
and Van Wassenhove (2013) analyze the engagement of per-
sonal computer manufacturers in Brazil, where take-back of
computers discarded by consumers has not been fully mandated
by legislation. Based primarily on archival data collection meth-
ods supplemented by interviews, the authors conclude that the
level of manufacturers’ engagement in take-back initiatives is
low compared to the situation in the United States. They high-
light the low residual values and low volume of returned com-
puters, limited availability of recycling facilities, weak enforce-
ment of environmental law, and a small presence of pressure
groups as factors that deter the participation of original equip-
ment manufacturers. The authors provide recommendations
on how to enhance the situation in Brazil and identify areas in
which further research is needed.
In his column, “Extended Producer Responsibility for Pack-
aging and Printed Paper in the United States,” Paul Gardner,
the executive director of Recycling Reinvented, argues that
consumer brand owners should take over 100% of the costs
of collection and recycling of packaging and printed paper in
the United States (Gardner 2013). He points to a patchwork
of more than 9,000 recycling programs across the country as
a key impediment to effective and cost-efficient recycling and
emphasizes EPR as pivotal to diverting valuable materials from
landfill disposal.
In “Canadian Extended Producer Responsibility Programs:
The Shift from Program Roll Out to Program Performance,”
Duncan Bury, long the lead in Environment Canada on EPR
and now an independent consultant, maintains that the debate
over whether EPR is appropriate and effective is largely over in
Canada and instead the focus has shifted to the structure of EPR
programs and the role of government oversight (Bury 2013). He
describes the “EPR Canada Report Card,” an annual evaluation
by EPR Canada, a partnership of EPR experts, intended to
benchmark, score, and monitor the activities of federal and
provincial governments with respect to EPR.
Conclusion
The research in this issue provides a snapshot of the devel-
opment of EPR at the beginning of the third decade of this
policy strategy. It provides insights into how and why EPR has
evolved into its current form and how it might evolve further
to achieve the goals its proponents have espoused. From a re-
search perspective, however, what are really needed are answers
to some key questions. Given the dearth of EPR systems that are
appropriately structured to generate incentives for eco-design,
there are empirical and conceptual puzzles. Why have so few
jurisdictions not opted to create systems conducive to such in-
centives? And, given what is now known about the complexity

of EPR implementation, what would such a system look like?
Mayers and colleagues (2013) provide one answer, but more are
needed.
Another issue worth looking into is the potential of address-
ing waste prevention, such as reuse, via EPR. Some express
concerns that while EPR may enhance recycling, it may dimin-
ish existing initiatives on reuse. Is it really the case? If so, how
could EPR be redesigned to better address the reuse of prod-
ucts? This is especially relevant when various governments—
not least in Europe because of the mandate under the 2008
EU Waste Framework Directive4 —seek to find concrete policy
measures to tackle waste prevention.
A third set of questions revolves around outcomes. While
there is a great deal of information about the levels of recy-
cling achieved via EPR, there is not a commensurate knowl-
edge of the cost-effectiveness of this strategy. EPR opponents
often argue that traditional approaches to recycling accom-
plish as much or more at lower cost (e.g., SAIC 2012).
Yet we don’t actually have defensible numbers on costs and
benefits.
It is not surprising that there are few such analyses. The
data and accounting challenges in calculating and allocating
costs and benefits in EPR programs are truly daunting. EPR is
used to manage a wide variety of wastes under vastly different
approaches. Governments, producers, and PROs are often dis-
inclined to expend the resources to collect the relevant data or
they object to disclosure of what they view as proprietary infor-
mation. The fallback is usually to assess programs by comparing
the cost per ton of EPR systems as experienced by PROs. Yet the
systems are conspicuously different in their scope and require-
ments, so one cannot simply compare the cost per ton faced
by FOST Plus in Belgium for its packaging take-back system
to the one in Germany or Manitoba, Canada. Such compar-
isons are truly misleading. If we really want to know if EPR
makes sense and/or how it might achieve its very attractive
goals, we need much more data and consistent and transparent
accounting systems. Until we get that we will remain in the
weeds.
Notes
1. For example, NWNA has funded the establishment of an advocacy
organization, Recycling Reinvented, in the United States.
2. See http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/weee/index_en.htm.
3. See, e.g., the IPR Works coalition (http://iprworks.org/).
4. See http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/framework/index.htm.
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About the Authors
Reid Lifset is a resident fellow in industrial ecology in the
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale Univer-
sity in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Atalay Atasu is an
assistant professor in the College of Management at the Geor-
gia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Naoko
Tojo is an associate professor in the International Institute
for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University in
Lund, Sweden.
Address correspondence to:
Reid Lifset
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
195 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT, USA 06511
reid.lifset@yale.edu