Extended Producer Responsibility as a Technique

In one line

Extended producer responsibility makes the person who put the product on the market answer for it after the buyer has thrown it away, and in India that duty is now discharged by buying a certificate.

The three statutory definitions are worth setting side by side. Rule 2(h) of the Plastic Waste Management Rules 2016: the responsibility of a producer for the environmentally sound management of the product until the end of its life. Rule 3(m) of the Battery Waste Management Rules 2022: the responsibility of any producer of a battery for the environmentally sound management of a waste battery. Rule 3(m) of the E-Waste (Management) Rules 2022, and this is the narrow one: the responsibility of any producer of the equipment in Schedule I for meeting recycling targets as per Schedules III and IV, only through registered recyclers, to ensure environmentally sound management.

The idea

The ordinary rule of waste law is that the person holding the waste must deal with it. That rule locates the duty at the end of the chain, on the household, the hospital or the local body, and it has a defect that cannot be cured by enforcement. The person holding the waste did not choose the design, the material, the laminate, the glue, or whether the battery could be removed. The producer chose all of those, and the producer is the only person who can change them.

Extended producer responsibility moves the duty backwards along the chain, to the point where the decision that created the waste was made. Three consequences follow, and a good answer names all three.

It internalises the cost. The cost of collection and recycling becomes a cost of production, so it appears in the price of the product rather than in a municipal budget.

It creates a design incentive. If a producer pays for the disposal of what it sells, a product that is cheaper to recycle is cheaper to sell. That is the whole theory, and it is why rules 16(9) and 16(10) of the e-waste rules oblige a producer to use technology that makes the end product recyclable and to ensure that components made by different manufacturers are compatible with each other.

It identifies a defendant. Waste has no owner once it is discarded. Extended producer responsibility supplies one.

How India does it, in four steps

The Indian design is the same in the plastic, electronic and battery rules and is worth learning once.

Step one, registration. The producer registers on the Central Pollution Control Board's portal. There is no plan, no authorisation and no discretion to argue about, which is exactly what the 2022 e-waste rules abolished.

Step two, the target. A quantity, set by a schedule. In the plastic rules it is a percentage of the packaging placed on the market, category-wise. In the battery rules it is a collection target measured against what was sold years earlier, calibrated to the average life of the battery. In the e-waste rules the target for each product is decided on the basis of the information on the portal and the individual product's life period as laid down by the Board, so a refrigerator sold in 2020 becomes waste at a different time from a telephone sold in 2020, and the rule reflects that.