Extended Producer Responsibility As a Driver for Design Change: Utopia or Reality?

Policies based upon Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) aim to reduce the environmental impacts of products by inducing design changes, by way of an extension of producer's responsibility. Since the early 1990s, a number of countries have EPR-based policies related to end-of-life management of selected product groups. The incorporation of incentive mechanisms for design change in an EPR programme is, however, perceived to face various challenges, especially for durable, complex products. This book, published originally in 2004 as a PhD thesis, presents two sets of in-depth evaluation studies conducted in search of EPR programmes which incorporate the theoretically envisioned incentive mechanisms in practice. It argues that the presence of mandatory EPR programmes do provide positive impacts for the environmental design strategies of manufacturers, especially when implementation is based upon forms of so called individual responsibility where individual producers assume responsibility for the end-of-life management of their own products. It highlights a range of concrete implementation mechanisms for individual responsibility and their essential components.