Extended Producer Responsibility: The New Wave to Pay for Recycling Programs?

Graphic courtesy National Caucus of Environmental Legislators

You’ve probably read it in other publications: 2021 seems to be the year of Extended Producer Responsibility initiatives across the U.S.

What is Extended Producer Responsibility? Think of it as "product-maker pays for taking care of the end product.” It’s a policy tool that’s been used as a way to have product manufacturers pay for the social cost of disposing of certain products when it hasn’t been embedded in the consumer’s purchase price.

Sometimes, it’s a fee on products that is then turned over to governments, the industry, or a third-party entity to take care of the social impact of their product; in other cases, such as "bottle bill” states, the manufacturers themselves must actually take care of their product when the consumer has finished with it.

The hope is that it will cause product manufacturers to look for ways to lower the impact of their product on the environment. It’s also called product stewardship.

The National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, a group of state assembly members from legislatures around the country, developed a template EPR bill to help the traditional recycling industry, which has been beleaguered by market problems caused by the China Sword (refusal of Chinese companies to take contamination from U.S.-shipped recyclables). However, USCC and its allies, such as the Biodegradable Products Institute and Compost Manufacturing Alliance, have been working behind the scenes because many of the bills introduced steer the funding toward recycling programs for cans, bottles and paper - not organics collection.

So far, USCC has written letters of opposition to bills that have not included organics programs as beneficiaries of the fees in New York and Oregon. See letters here.

It is unfair to collect fees from our allies in this industry that do not directly benefit the industry. Additionally, the population’s recent aversion to single-use products and the push to make them compostable is wreaking havoc on compost manufacturers’ contamination problems and exacerbating infrastructure issues.

One bill in Oregon does include compost infrastructure development as a recipient of funds, and USCC is poised to support that. Stay tuned for more on this developing policy issue.