Extended Producer Responsibility Policies Offer a Solution to the Waste Crisis | Article

The world faces a waste crisis: over 2.1 billion tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) are generated each year globally, equivalent to 822,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The United States alone, despite accounting for only four percent of the global population, generates 300 million tons of MSW per year—or almost one ton of waste per person—the most per capita in the world. Of this waste, only 16 percent is recycled. The remaining waste is sent to landfills or incinerated, causing significant health and environmental damage to the surrounding communities.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, curbside recycling currently recovers just 32 percent of recyclables from single-family homes. Recycling often falls on municipal waste systems, the operating costs of which have skyrocketed in recent years due to new restrictions on global recycling markets, placing a steep financial burden on local communities.

Additionally, the increased creation of complex product packaging adds further strain on waste management systems. Many existing plastic products cannot be recycled, and those that head to the recycling bin often end up in a landfill or, at best, are “downcycled” a maximum of two or three times before their quality decreases to the point where they can no longer be used. More effective strategies are needed to design fully-recyclable waste from the start and to divert waste into more sustainable end uses.

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a solution gaining increasing traction among state and federal lawmakers. EPR seeks to shift more financial and physical responsibility for the environmental impacts of products away from citizens and onto producers and packaging manufacturers over the lifecycle of their own products. EPR programs already exist in the United States for a variety of products like paint, carpet, and batteries, but there are no existing EPR programs for product packaging in the country. EPR packaging programs exist, however, throughout Europe, Canada, Asia, and South America.

According to Neil Seldman, director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Waste to Wealth initiative, there are beneficial and harmful ways to design an EPR policy.

“Positive EPR policies require producers and distributors to take back products and packages that are hard to recycle, or contain toxic elements with no opportunity for adding value,” Seldman said.

Positive EPR plans should make full use of reuse, recovery, repair, and resale of products like electronics, which provide high potential social and economic opportunities for local communities. Seldman cautions that bad EPR plans, on the other hand, allow for unsustainable end uses like incineration of mattresses and carpets, or shredding of electronic waste. According to Seldman, the most problematic EPR plans remove local stakeholders from the decision-making process.

In such EPR programs, “industry controls the entire recycling system, removing local government from responsibility, capacity, and authority,” Seldman said. “This eliminates the opportunity for residents and small businesses to impact decision-making at the local level.”

Although interest in EPR packaging bills have increased this year, some stakeholders are pushing to ensure that proposed programs maintain existing recycling infrastructure and allow waste haulers and recyclers control of existing systems. Seldman points out that recycling is a sector that spans hundreds of thousands of businesses and government programs and is responsible for 757,000 jobs, meaning that it is essential that local control over recycling remains intact. Maine’s proposed EPR legislation would create a stewardship model to oversee the EPR process, which would help avoid industry control.

Over 12 states have their own versions of EPR bills in various stages of the legislative process: California’s Plastic Pollution Producer Responsibility Act (SB-54) seeks to make businesses financially responsible for management and recovery of plastic waste, which would help achieve a 75 percent source reduction, recycling, and reuse goal. Both Maryland’s HB-36 and New York’s S1185A would prohibit producers from selling products without an approved plan for recovering products. Massachusetts’s H.D.1553 would direct packaging producers to establish a producer responsibility organization (PRO) and submit a stewardship plan for how the PRO will run the program and reimburse collectors. While proposed state EPR programs vary, they all share a common framework of shifting more responsibility to manufacturers.

At the federal level, Title IX of the Clean FUTURE Act (H.R.1512) seeks to establish a “task force to develop and propose recommendations on the design of a national extended producer responsibility system for products in the marketplace.” The Act includes a variety of waste-related initiatives, such as establishing post-consumer recycled content standards for certain products, standardizing recycling labels, and ensuring the consideration of environmental justice impacts in hazardous waste disposal. The Clean FUTURE Act follows up on other federal waste and recycling-related bills recently introduced, such as the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020 (H.R.5845) and the Zero Waste Act of 2019 (H.R.4050).

With no end to the waste crisis in sight, more wide-ranging and innovative solutions are needed. While no one “silver bullet” can solve the waste crisis, EPR can be part of the solution to hold manufacturers more responsible and address the environmental impacts of their products throughout their whole lifecycles. While it remains to be seen whether EPR will be incorporated into federal law, its increasing popularity in proposed legislative measures is a sign that more policymakers, companies, and civil society advocates are calling for policy action to address the scale of the waste crisis.

Author: Celine Yang

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