Product Policy Institute Releases New Legislative Toolkit

By Matt Prindiville, Associate Director 

After many requests for an organized resource to provide background for legislators and advocates interested in EPR issues, we’ve put one together that provides a good starting point for understanding and advocating for producer responsibility initiatives.

On our new Legislative Toolkit page, you’ll find our EPR Starter Kit, which is a great resource to learn more about EPR policy and key issues to understand and address during legislative campaigns. You’ll discover our History of EPR in North America, which is a primer on how EPR evolved in the United States and Canada.  You can also find links to model legislation, product campaign resources, a list of EPR advocates in the United States, and more. 

Lastly, we feature our recently-developed fact sheet on economic benefits of producer responsibility.  There have been a lot of excellent new reports on recycling and jobs - from the 2011 Tellus Institute Report, which demonstrates that we can create 1.5 million new jobs by increasing our national recycling rate to 75%, to the Container Recycling Institute Jobs report, which shows that container-deposit recycling initiatives (a.k.a. “bottle bills”) create more jobs than any other type of recycling initiative to date.  We’ve compiled key findings from these reports and others demonstrating that there are real opportunities to grow American jobs through increasing recycling - and that EPR is a key policy tool to achieve this goal.

We hope you find these resources helpful and that you will share our new Legislative Toolkit with anyone who may be interested in sustainability issues.  We’re also completely open to suggestions for new materials or even new research that we can conduct to help support your efforts to advance producer responsibility.  You can e-mail Matt Prindiville at matt@productpolicy.org with your feedback.