"How can packaging become sustainable when end of life treatment is externalized to municipalities?" tweeted Minal Mistry recently from the Sustainable Packaging Coalition spring conference in Seattle, Washington.
In a thought provoking article, Mistry makes the point that industry is increasingly working towards front end innovation to reduce material usage and ease of recycling, while on the other end, local municipalities strive to introduce improved technologies that will help provide a more efficient recycling infrastructure. Walmart was instrumental in influencing packaging material reduction through its packaging scorecard, and now through its $100 million Closed Loop Fund, directed at investment in infrastructure, is now acknowledging that need as well.
There is, of course, Mistry notes, a disconnect in the middle of the equation, and that has to do with the cost of packaging material recovery being externalized by product manufacturers to the public. An externality, Mistry elaborates, "is a cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit - in this case, society." The social purse, already drained by many urgent and competing social needs, often does not have the funds available to develop comprehensive recycling infrastructures.
The solution is to "internalize" those costs back to producers with respect to post-use management of packaging material. This Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) approach, Mistry writes, has been used effectively in Europe as well as in Canada. In fact, a producer responsibility program has just been launched in British Columbia, with manufacturers being levied a charge per kilogram of packaging material, with cost scaled according to the recycling cost impact of the packaging material involved. The introduction of the plan has not been without some degree of pushback from industry, claiming that the cost will pass through to consumers (whereas at present it is pushed back through to taxpayers whether they consume or not, just to be clear). Mistry stresses that EPR is not the only solution, and that he urges industry to find more creative alternatives.
How Can Packaging Be Sustainable When Costs Are Externalized to Taxpayers? originally appeared on About.com Recycling on Wednesday, May 28th, 2014 at 15:18:53.
