The movement to shift responsibility for spent products and packaging from taxpayers to the producers who design, make and sell them is growing both among leading corporations and state and local governments in the United States. Dozens of new industry programs and state laws to reduce the life cycle impacts of products and packaging have been initiated or adopted in the last decade. The terms, “product stewardship” and “extended producer responsibility” have been used in various ways to describe these activities.
To allow for
healthy public discussion, three leading organizations in the product stewardship
field recently agreed on a consistent set of definitions. The Product
Stewardship Institute, the Product
Policy Institute, and the California
Product Stewardship Council spent over a year harmonizing concepts and
soliciting input from stakeholders from business, government, and public
interest organizations across North America. The resulting definitions are consistent with
international definitions, but also reflect the progress that has been made in
the past decade since the product stewardship movement took off in the U.S. The definitions have been endorsed so far by 48
businesses, stewardship organizations, government agencies, and non-profit
organizations and are posted on the websites listed below.
The new definitions
replace previous definitions used in the United States over the past decade.
Please use these official definitions in any future coverage of these issues:
Product Stewardship
Product Stewardship is the act of
minimizing health, safety, environmental and social impacts, and maximizing
economic benefits of a product and its packaging throughout all lifecycle
stages. The producer of the product has the greatest ability to minimize
adverse impacts, but other stakeholders, such as suppliers, retailers, and
consumers, also play a role. Stewardship can be either voluntary or required by
law.
Extended Producer Responsibility
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a mandatory type of product stewardship that includes, at a minimum, the requirement that the producer’s responsibility for their product extends to post-consumer management of that product and its packaging. There are two related features of EPR policy: (1) shifting financial and management responsibility, with government oversight, upstream to the producer and away from the public sector; and (2) providing incentives to producers to incorporate environmental considerations into the design of their products and packaging.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a mandatory type of product stewardship that includes, at a minimum, the requirement that the producer’s responsibility for their product extends to post-consumer management of that product and its packaging. There are two related features of EPR policy: (1) shifting financial and management responsibility, with government oversight, upstream to the producer and away from the public sector; and (2) providing incentives to producers to incorporate environmental considerations into the design of their products and packaging.
Want to add the
name of your business or organization to the list of endorsers? Go to this link:
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