EPR Certificate: Right to Getting
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) can be a strong rule principle in waste organization.
Over the years it has been introduce worldwide for dissimilar waste stream. Based on its
European experience ISWA defines some key considerations for successful implementation of
EPR throughout the world.
By uneven responsibility for certain crop once they have become waste from tax payers to
customers and producers, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) enables an internalization
of the effects of consumption. EPR has been implementing with mixed success. In some
countries it has been implemented through clear legislation and shaped working cooperation
between governments, producers and waste management organizations. In additional
countries, the implementation of EPR has turned out to be a failure due to a lack of
internalization of environmental expenses as well as inadequate quality of collection service to
the public.
EPR’s Background
Issues of environmental protection were first discussed in policy circles in the 1970s. Since then
a number of fundamental principles of sustainable development such as the 'precautionary
principle', the principle of 'prevention' and the 'polluter pays' principle, have slowly become
fundamental to policy development both within the EU and internationally. The concept of EPR
was primary introduced by Thomas Lindquist, professor at the Lund University in Sweden. In
1990, he wrote a report for the Swedish Ministry of Environment about this policy principle that
places a responsibility for a product's end-of-life impact on the creator and retailer of that
product. The necessity for the introduction of EPR come from the rising awareness that other
environmental policy measures might not be enough to reach the environmental goal of society.
The responsibility of the producer can be physical, financial and/or informational. According to
the OECD, internalization of external environmental costs is wary a fundamental aspect of
environmental policy design and more specifically of EPR and these tenets have now been
formally included into the EU Waste structure Directive. Although producers have the primary
responsibility under EPR, all actors of the product chain and in society have a accountability.
Objectives of EPR
1 Create a sustainable production and consumption policy
EPR is a key constituent in implementing a sustainable production and consumption policy,
promoting resource efficiency, high-quality recycling, replacement, use of secondary raw
materials and the production of sustainable goods. As a result, it should improve the
environmental performance of products throughout their life cycle, while gathering industrial and
customer needs.

2 Incentives for eco design
Introduce of EPR, producers should be encouraged to incorporate change in the plan of
products in order to be more environmentally sound. This should make products easier to
dismantle, reuse and recycle. In this way, the sum ecological crash of a product decrease and
waste prevention is stimulated.
3. Reduce land filling and develop recycling and recovery channels
EPR should reduce land filling of waste and lead to greater than before recycling, under
environmentally, healthy and socially desirable situation. In this way, EPR can make meaningful
jobs in the recycle and waste management sector.
4. Full internalization of environmental costs
The full internalization of environmental costs allows financing the sustainable and cost-
effectively efficient management of misuse. The environmental costs, at the smallest amount,
include costs for pollution prevention and the collection, recycling and treatment of waste. These
environmental costs should be incorporated into the price of crop. As a consequence, the
consumer, and not the taxpayer, bears all costs connected to the waste he has produced, which
is more publicly fair.
Impact of EPR
In 2006, Van Rossem et al. concluded there is together implicit and explicit evidence of the
impact of EPR on product design. Even though it is documented that determinants of product
innovation are coming from a diversity of push and pull factors such as legislation, customer
preferences, EPR does give tangible incentives for environmentally-conscious plan.
More specifically, EPR legislation had an crash on hazardous materials reduction and improved
recyclability and recycling of products. The researchers finished that the drivers of ecodesign
are strengthened when there is criticism on the total end-of-life expenses to individual
producers. They did not only see an impact on the design of new crop, but also saw
considerable improvements in the collection of discarded products and action of these products.
Furthermore, research by INSEAD concluded that the implementation of the WEEE Directive
has led to an increase in the collection and recycling of WEEE. When it comes to shifting the
financial responsibility from the general taxpayer towards the creator, Van Rossem et al.
concluded that municipalities in at least nine countries still had the compulsion to finance the
compilation of WEEE from household in 2006.
Extensive research by the European Commission on 36 case study of EPR on different waste
stream in the European Union revealed that in most of the benchmark bags, the net operational
costs for collection, transportation and action of separately collected waste are covered by the
EPR system.

The degree to which net ready costs are assumed by producer is highly variable and depends
notably on the share of organizational and financial responsibilities of the variety of stockholder,
as well as on the national structure for EPR.