Material Flows from Electronic Waste: Understanding the Shortages for Extended Producer Responsibility Implementation in Vietnam

Extended producer responsibility policies and interventions propose a template for electronic waste management with considerable and growing discursive and policy traction worldwide. Originating in the global North, they increasingly implicate countries and sites in the global South, in particular, people working in informal electronic waste hubs that process Northern electronic waste. This paper examines the implications of extended producer responsibility in one such place through the lenses of critical waste studies and the dis/articulations approach to global commodity chains, which can usefully be extended to analyze the afterlife of commodities. From Israel and the Palestinian Authority's perspectives, recently activated extended producer responsibility legislation is a common-sense way to rationalize the management of electronic waste. But from the cluster of Palestinian villages that has processed the bulk of Israel's electronic waste for more than a decade, extended producer responsibility constitutes the most recent in a series of external driving forces that have disarticulated and rearticulated their landscapes and livelihoods from external economies over the last half century. The restricted scope of reformist extended producer responsibility policies notion of “responsibility” combined with the asymmetrical terms of dis/articulation between North and South is likely to result in outcomes that not only downgrade the informal sector's position in the value chain, but also undermine their ability to upgrade the electronic waste sector in a way that could avoid further pollution. We consider the options at this junction using the heuristic of suggesting what a more temporally, geographically, and sectorally conceived “extension of responsibility” might mean for extended producer responsibility.

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Applying the extended producer responsibility towards plastic waste in Asian developing countries for reducing marine plastic debris

Waste Management & Research ◽

10.1177/0734242x211013412 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 0734242X2110134

Author(s):

Hendro Putra Johannes ◽

Michikazu Kojima ◽

Fusanori Iwasaki ◽

Ellen Putri Edita

Keyword(s):

Developing Countries ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Electronic Waste ◽

Transportation Cost ◽

Free Riding ◽

Plastic Waste ◽

Extended Producer Responsibility ◽

Producer Responsibility ◽

Rural And Remote Areas ◽

High Transportation Cost

The extended producer responsibility (EPR) has been adopted in many countries throughout the world to give producers responsibility to manage their products until the post-consumer stage. On many occasions in developing countries, the system is mostly implemented for electronic waste. However, with the rising concern on the marine plastic issue, developing countries, including those in Asia, have started to apply EPR for package and container waste. In practice, developing countries show significant differences in their EPR implementation compared with developed ones due to contrasting conditions of several factors, including social, economic and technology. This article aims to explore the challenges of developing countries to apply EPR as well as determine possible measures to overcome the challenges. Results show that applying EPR system for plastic waste in developing countries faces many challenges, such as the existence of a market-based collection system of recyclables, high transportation cost, lack of waste collection services in rural areas, a limited number of facilities to manage certain types of plastic waste, insufficient pollution control and free riding and orphan products. The challenges, furthermore, can be minimised by differentiating the responsibility of producers, focusing on rural and remote areas, involving informal sectors, creating joint facilities in recycling parks, expanding waste management collection services, increasing the use of EPR and minimising free riding.

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Does Extended Producer Responsibility Improve Eco-Innovation: An Empirical Study of Product Take-Back Programs

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.3687582 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Yuqi Peng ◽

Yan Dong ◽

Sriram Venkataraman ◽

Sining Song

Keyword(s):

Empirical Study ◽

Extended Producer Responsibility ◽

Take Back ◽

Producer Responsibility

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Enabling Reuse in Extended Producer Responsibility Schemes for White Goods: Legal and Organisational Conditions for Connecting Resource Flows and Actors

Circular Economy and Sustainability ◽

10.1007/s43615-021-00053-w ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Carl Dalhammar ◽

Emelie Wihlborg ◽

Leonidas Milios ◽

Jessika Luth Richter ◽

Sahra Svensson-Höglund ◽

...

Keyword(s):

End Of Life ◽

Energy Recovery ◽

Large Scale ◽

Empirical Investigation ◽

Extended Producer Responsibility ◽

Waste Streams ◽

Pilot Projects ◽

Waste Hierarchy ◽

Producer Responsibility ◽

White Goods

AbstractExtended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes have proliferated across Europe and other parts of the world in recent years and have contributed to increasing material and energy recovery from waste streams. Currently, EPR schemes do not provide sufficient incentives for moving towards the higher levels of the waste hierarchy, e.g. by reducing the amounts of waste through incentivising the design of products with longer lifespans and by enhancing reuse activities through easier collection and repair of end-of-life products. Nevertheless, several municipalities and regional actors around Europe are increasingly promoting reuse activities through a variety of initiatives. Furthermore, even in the absence of legal drivers, many producer responsibility organisations (PROs), who execute their members’ responsibilities in EPR schemes, are considering promoting reuse and have initiated a number of pilot projects. A product group that has been identified as having high commercial potential for reuse is white goods, but the development of large-scale reuse of white goods seems unlikely unless a series of legal and organisational barriers are effectively addressed. Through an empirical investigation with relevant stakeholders, based on interviews, and the analysis of two case studies of PROs that developed criteria for allowing reusers to access their end-of-life white goods, this contribution presents insights on drivers and barriers for the repair and reuse of white goods in EPR schemes and discusses potential interventions that could facilitate the upscale of reuse activities. Concluding, although the reuse potential for white goods is high, the analysis highlights the currently insufficient policy landscape for incentivising reuse and the need for additional interventions to make reuse feasible as a mainstream enterprise.

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‘Our Waste, our Resources; A Strategy for England’– Switching to a circular economy through the use of extended producer responsibility

Environmental Law Review ◽

10.1177/1461452919851943 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 21 (3) ◽

pp. 210-218

Author(s):

Louis Dawson

Keyword(s):

Waste Disposal ◽

Circular Economy ◽

Food Environment ◽

Extended Producer Responsibility ◽

Legislative Agenda ◽

Producer Responsibility ◽

Polluter Pays Principle ◽

Potential Use

High landfill rates compared with flatlining rates of recycling have ensured that waste disposal is once again on the legislative agenda in England. In 2018, the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs published ‘Our Waste, Our Resources: A Strategy for England’ which is the first major policy publication on waste since 2013. Encouraged by the release of this Strategy, this article examines the potential use of extended producer responsibility and the ‘polluter pays’ principle to fuel the transition to a circular economy.

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