Overview

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.