Producer Take-Back Campaigns

Since GRRN’s inception, producer responsibility has been a key ingredient of our program and agenda for achieving Zero Waste. Shifting the costs of waste from taxpayers to brand owners and producers creates a powerful economic incentive to design waste out of the system and substantially reduce the use of toxic materials. Moreover, strategies like producer responsibility that don’t rely on taxpayer dollars are increasingly attractive to policy makers facing budget deficits and revenue shortfalls. Today’s fiscal climate presents a moment of tremendous opportunity to make producer responsibility for waste a reality.

Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, and including ‘producer take-back’ systems, describes policies and practices requiring product brand-owners to take full physical or financial responsibility for the life-cycle impacts of their products, from product design to end-of-life product management.

Extended Producer Responsibility has been a major movement since the early 1990s in other countries, but it has been slower to take off in the United States. This is beginning to change through collaborative endeavors like GRRN's Beverage Take-Back Campaign (see below), the Computer TakeBack Campaign (see below), the Clean Car Campaign [off-site], the Mercury Policy Project [off-site], and the work of Clean Production Action [off-site], Washington Citizens for Resource Conservation (which produced a Citizens Guide to Producer Responsibility [off-site],) and Product Policy Institute [off-site].

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Campaigns

Computer TakeBack [off-site]
The national Computer TakeBack Campaign is a coordinated multi-state effort to enact producer responsibility for discarded computers and consumer electronics and push industry leader Dell Computer to “Take it Back, Make it Clean, and Recycle Responsibly.” Learn more and get involved through www.computertakeback.com [off-site].

Beverage Take-Back
Bottle bills are the ‘mother of producer responsibility legislation’ in North America. GRRN led a successful campaign to get Pepsi Cola and Coca-Cola to use recycled content in their plastic bottles as a first step towards increased beverage container takeback. GRRN also helped write a National Producer Responsibility Bottle Bill expressly based on EPR principles which was introduced in the US Senate.

Archived

Mercury Switch-Out
After years of unnecessary delay, the automakers ceased using mercury switches in 2003. But unless the cars that are already out there have been properly retired, mercury switches are still a possible hazard. Leare more about how you can be active here.

Confront Dow! (Herbicide Threatens Composting)
The discovery of Dow’s ultra-persistent herbicide, clopyralid, in compost around the country is threatening not only growers and gardeners but community systems that depend on composting to divert tons of yard waste, food, land-clearing debris and other organic material from landfills.

Resources



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