Abstract
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), a widely used policy tool, requires producers to assume financial and/or operational responsibility for ensuring their end-of-life products are properly collected and treated. EPR implementation in today’s economy, however, poses a change as some basic, underlying assumptions do not hold. Today’s economy challenges assumptions that (1) waste is costly to recover, (2) waste consists only of end-of-life products, and (3) waste is homogenous with respect to its geographic location, design, or condition. In this chapter, we discuss the impact of EPR on waste markets when these assumptions are challenged.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, under the WEEE Directive, “producer” is defined as “any person who, irrespective of the selling technique used (1) manufactures and sells EEE under his own brand, (2) resells under his own brand equipment produced by other suppliers, (3) imports or exports EEE on a professional basis into a Member State.”
- 2.
We call these “unofficial” because they are not registered under a regulatory body and the amount of waste they handle does not count toward meeting regulatory targets.
- 3.
Figure 14.1 is only representative and not comprehensive. In reality, many other loops may exist between entities involved in this reverse chain and some relationships we show may not exist under certain circumstances. Furthermore, the figure only shows the flow of e-waste from B2C; it is argued that almost all e-waste originating from B2B customers ends up in the hands of unofficial entities (Huisman et al. 2012).
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Esenduran, G., Atasu, A. (2016). The Effect of EPR on the Markets for Waste. In: Atasu, A. (eds) Environmentally Responsible Supply Chains. Springer Series in Supply Chain Management, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30094-8_14
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