Produced by the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers (Globalrec) and WIEGO, this series seeks to understand how the increasing adoption of EPR policies and systems around the world can threaten or enhance the livelihoods of informal waste pickers who have traditionally been key actors in the recycling and reuse of materials.
EPR – Extended Producer Responsibility
Around the world, more and more waste is ending up in the environment. People are throwing away a lot, but there’s not enough funding and expertise in sustainable waste management. Policy makers and civil society are trying to solve this problem through something called Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR. EPR holds companies more responsible for the impacts of what they produce by requiring them to finance, and often also manage, the recycling, reuse, or disposal of their products and packaging. So EPR is a way to demand that the producers who profit from products take responsibility for cleaning them up.
