IES Policy Forum
| Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for e-Waste -- challenges and opportunities |
Left to right: H. Kalimo, R. Lifset
The EU’s WEEE directive is currently under review, and as it has a strong focus on Extended Producer Responsibility, the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) and the Institute for European Studies (IES) welcomed participants to an Environmental Policy Forum on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for e-Waste on Monday 1 March. The distinguished speakers were Mr. Reid Lifset, Resident Fellow in the Center for Industrial Ecology and Associate Director of the Industrial Environmental Management Program at the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and Professor Harri Kalimo, a senior research Fellow at the IES who has been a visiting scholar for a number of years at Yale University.
|
Summary
The collaboration of Harri and Reid focuses on the issue of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). EPR refers to the idea that, by assigning the responsibility to producers for the end-of-life management of their products, producers are driven to consider environmental issues around the end-of-life management of their products. The speakers claim that the notion of individual producer responsibility (IPR) has been at the core of the concept all along.
The individual nature of the responsibility underlines the objective of maximizing the incentives for individual companies to reduce the environmental impact of their products through intelligent design changes. If company A knows it needs to take back and deal with its “A” branded products when they become waste, the company has an incentive to optimise its products for such takeback and recovery operations. The issue of extended producer responsibility is an important part of the EU’s path breaking WEEE directive (2002) on the takeback and recovery of waste electronic and electrical products. It is currently in the center of EU policy debates because the directive is currently being revised. Some of the revisions relate to the fact that the EU Member States have implemented extended producer responsibility in the majority of cases either inadequately, or not at all. During the lunch event, Reid and Harri gave a collective presentation, where they explained IPR to the wider policy audience. MR. Reid gave a brief historical overview of the concept of EPR and IPR and the issue of voluntary agreements with industry that were not being met. The presentation elaborated problems that IPR is facing in the current WEEE Directive as well as in the proposed revision process. The researchers concluded that there are many “elephants in the room”: important structural questions on management of waste electronics that remain unaddressed in the policy discussions.
For example, the huge problem of illegal shipments of e-waste to developing countries needs to be fully addressed, quite obviously. Yet the issue is even more challenging, because this should be done in a way that will not destroy the legal and environmentally sound parts of e-waste management systems that are emerging in developing countries. The latter are quickly growing into environmentally, economically, and socially important parts of the societies in developing countries, not least because of the growing domestic use of electronics there. Another elephant is the fact that under current practice, most e-waste is shredded (mechanically torn into small parts) for recovery. What does that imply for incentives to design products more environmentally?
[Back]
IES is a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the 