Role Of Extended Producer Responsibility In Effective Smart Waste Management

Swachhcoin
3 min readFeb 5, 2019

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Extended Producer Responsibility is a practice whereby importers and producers of products bear a significant level of responsibility for their products. They would be responsible for the impact their product makes on the environment throughout the lifecycle of the product. This would involve upstream impacts which include the selection of materials for the products, impacts from the production process, and downstream impacts from the use and disposal of the products. Producers have to design their products to fit in as environmentally friendly throughout its life cycle. They will also have to accept legal, socioeconomic or physical responsibility for environmental impacts that cannot be removed by design.

Image Credit: Eco-Business

Seeing the increasing amounts of waste produced yearly, many governments have decided to place the post-consumer phase responsibility for certain goods on the producer. Assigning such responsibility to producers would provide incentives to prevent wastes during manufacturing, promote the product design for the environment and support the realization of public recycling goals.

What is Smart Waste Management?

Smart waste management is waste disposal in methods that will have little or no adverse effect on the environment. It is waste disposal in the best possible way. Smart waste management is a highly modified and sophisticated system of waste collection and disposal. The system involves recycling and proper waste disposal.

Roles of Producer Extended Responsibility

In extended producer responsibility, producers of products are responsible for product disposal at the end of the lifecycle of the products. This concept serves as an incentive for producers to produce more environmentally friendly products designs.

Rather than try to control the disposal of product using the conventional at the end of the road command and control methods. Extended producers make use of preventive measure using a life cycle approach i.e. ensure easy disposal right from when products are manufactured.

The benefits of extended producer responsibility concepts can be categorized as economic, environmental, and social. The cost of managing and coordinating the disposal of solid waste is most often the responsibility of local waste control agencies. Increasing levels of waste generation, stiff technical requirements for the operation of landfills and incinerators, and increasing difficulty in constructing new waste disposal facilities due to public disapproval all contribute to the growing cost of waste disposal. The government is majorly fiscally and physically responsible for waste disposal. Extended producer responsibility attempts to provide the incentive to producers to design products with reduced environmental impacts as well as shift the costs associated with disposal to the producer.

Advantages of Extended Producer Responsibility in Smart Waste Management

Extended producer responsibility has a lot of advantages. Some of such advantages are:

  • It leads to the reduction of waste in landfills and incinerators.
  • It encourages the production of environmentally friendly products.
  • It leads to the manufacture of easily recycled products.
  • It lowers the amount of waste produced during the lifecycle of a product.
  • It leads to a reduction in the cost of waste disposal.
  • It saves energy.
  • It reduces the cost of manufacturing new products as a waste product can be reused in the manufacturing process

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Swachhcoin

Aiming to implement & validate a system integrated w/ blockchain providing a robust, sustainable and efficient solution to revolutionise the waste management.