Foxes Guarding the Hen House?

For the first time since the enactment of the Waste Minimisation Act 2008, New Zealand is applying regulated (or mandatory) product stewardship to several priority products. By making those who manufacture, sell and use products responsible for minimising the waste those products cause, well-designed product stewardship schemes can act as a critical tool in the transition to a circular economy. However, the New Zealand government has put its faith in industry to lead scheme design. Such an approach threatens to vitiate robust, ambitious schemes and foreground industry interests over those of wider society and the natural environment. This article juxtaposes the radical potential of product stewardship against the probable outcome of industry-led schemes, and recommends reforms that the minister for the environment should pursue in order to shift the dial towards more inclusive design of product stewardship schemes.

Green design and product stewardship approach for two-warehouse inventory model

Background/Objectives: To trim down the recycling cost of any manufactured goods with the help of green design and product stewardship. Methods/Statistical analysis: For the planned EPQ (economic production quantity model) model, all costs are calculated to find total cost and this total cost is optimized with the help of the Hessian matrix. Sensitivity analysis is also carried w.r.t. different parameters, to illustrate the impact of these parameters on the proposed model. The convexity of the total cost function is also checked with the help of mathematical software Mathematica 9.0. Findings: Major finding of the proposed model are as follows: (i) Increase in the number of recycles results in the reduction of the total cost. (ii) Product stewardship parameter has a negative effect on total cost as the PS increases from 1 to 4 units, total cost decreases from 5926.00 to 5918.96 units (see Table 9 ) (similar findings can be written for numeric example 1 after correcting it). (iii) Green design costs have a positive effect on total cost, as the green design cost increases from 3 to 6 units, total cost also increases from 5918.49 to 5920.37 units (see Table 10 ). (iv) increase in the number of recycles results in the reduction of the total cost, as the number of recycles increases from 20 to 50 units total cost decreases from 5922.87 to 5919.12 units (see Table 11 ). Novelty/Applications: The Study of the effects of recycling by this green design and product stewardship approach makes the proposed model distinctive from the existing methods. The proposed model applies to eco-friendly manufacturing items with green design and product stewardship. Keywords: Green design; product stewardship; production model; own warehouse (OW); rented warehouse (RW); shortage; deterioration