Extended Producer Responsibility?

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is designed to shift the financial burden of recycling single-use plastics, paper and packaging to the companies that produce (or import) them. Financial incentives are expected to encourage companies to find innovative ways to recycle more materials and produce less packaging waste.

The process of centralizing the collection of funds from the producers in order to manage the collection and reuse of recyclable materials helps minimize the burden on municipalities and, ultimately, lower the costs to homes and businesses. The process may also help find more suitable markets for recycled materials, setting higher standards for maintaining the materials cycle (where materials may be reused without degradation, or down-cycled, to final disposal).

Though this has been an improvement to previous ad hoc efforts made by municipalities, there is little effort in the process (except a minor financial incentive) to encourage the standardization of materials that are more effectively recycled and, even better, the reduction of materials used in packaging – particularly single-use plastics.

Plastics generally do not disappear once they are in the environment. They just break down and become harder to clean up as they degrade into smaller and smaller bits, and ultimately become an emerging environmental and health concern in the form of microplastics. We continue to produce (and dispose of) about 400 metric tonnes of plastics on the planet each year. About a third of this plastic production (140 million metric tonnes) is directed to single-use products. That’s almost 40 lbs for each person on the planet each year! Only 1% of single-use plastics comes from recycled products.

Like all pollution it is much easier and cost-effective to prevent its release to the environment than it is to try to clean it up later. One of the easiest ways to reduce the amount of microplastics in the environment is to stop using single-use items like plastic bags, cutlery, straws, etc. With respect to the Extended Producer Responsibility program, more effort can be made to emphasize the ‘responsibility’. Single-use plastics should simply be banned. Producers that currently (over-)use plastics in packaging or single-use applications should be directed to shift to no-waste processes or to other materials, particularly those that can be more effectively reused (or recycled).

SAGE is concerned that the current EPR is long on managing recycled materials and short on its responsibility to eliminate single-use applications of materials. Where material use is essential, the selection should focus on recyclability, to close the materials cycle.

What can you do? Avoid of single-use plastics. Express you concerns to packaging-heavy producers and retailers.