 Extended Product Responsibility: An Economic Assessment of Alternative PoliciesKaren Palmer and Margaret Walls No 10830, Discussion Papers from Resources for the Future Abstract: Extended Product Responsibility embodies the notion that agents along a product chain should share responsibility for the life-cycle environmental impacts of the product, including those associated with ultimate disposal. Extended Producer Responsibility is a narrower concept which places responsibility on producers and focuses primarily on post-consumer waste disposal. Manufacturer "take-back" requirements are the policy lever most often associated with Extended Producer Responsibility. In this paper, we discuss alternative incentive-based policies that are consistent with the objectives of Extended Product and Producer Responsibility. We argue that an upstream combined product tax and recycling subsidy (UCTS) is generally more cost-effective and imposes fewer transactions costs than the take-back approach. We also consider the strengths and weaknesses of a policy not targeted at producers: unit-based pricing of residential waste collection and disposal. We find that this option shows potential for achieving non-trivial reductions in solid waste. Widespread application in the U.S. of a $1.00 charge per 32-gallon bag could reduce total municipal solid waste disposed by approximately 13 percent per year. Keywords: Environmental; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:rffdps:10830 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Discussion Papers from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC. |
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