Every Monday evening, I leave recycling boxes on the kerb outside my house. Much of this time is spent grumbling about the fact that I have left this task until the last minute, which is almost invariably the coldest, darkest, dampest part of the week, and cursing my procrastination.
Relatively little time is spent considering the complex systems of collection, sorting and disposal that follow. Yet for policymakers, businesses and environmentalists, that process is central to the debate about how responsibility for the full life cycle of a product should be borne.
Europe has taken the lead in extended producer responsibility regulation, which is essentially the idea that manufacturers should shoulder responsibility for their products from creation to disposal. There is a simple ethical justification for this, a development of the “polluter pays” principle that has been a mainstay of environmental law since the 1970s. But there is also a recognition policymakers must carefully use the levers available to them to encourage particular outcomes.
Some schemes have introduced levies to prod consumer behaviour. The classic example is the carrier bag levy, which has been a qualified success. Since it was introduced in 2002 in the Republic (2013 here in the North), the white plastic bags littering our hedges, verges, railway sidings and riverbanks have almost entirely disappeared, although other plastic packaging continues to blight these areas.
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It also saw something of an arms race between retailers and regulators, as they sought to design bags that were exempt of the charge and levies that disincentivised the practice altogether. While this has nudged behaviour toward reusable bags being the norm, it has also demonstrated retailers will go quite far to avoid changing their models, either building them into their operating costs or, especially in low-margin sectors, simply passing them on to the consumer.
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Sometimes, taxes can create perverse incentives. If a family of four drove a typical car the 420km from Cork to Belfast, they would use roughly 30 litres of petrol and emit about 70kg of CO₂. Flights between the two cities ceased in 2011, but if they resumed, the family might have produced 180kg, assuming a full flight. The car journey would have cost about €50 in fuel; between excise, carbon tax and VAT more than €30 of that would have been in tax. Aviation fuel is exempt from duty and VAT and so the flight would have attracted precisely nothing in tax.
That contrast illustrates both the strength and the weakness of environmental taxation. Motorists cannot avoid fuel duty or carbon tax. Air travellers, by contrast, benefit from a long-standing international exemption on aviation fuel. This is one reason short-haul flights can appear cheap compared with rail or road, even when the climate cost is higher. Air Passenger Duty in Britain or the old Air Travel Tax here were designed to redress the balance, but both have been politically unpopular.
Extended producer responsibility attempts to close the gap differently. Instead of taxing end users, it tries to push responsibility back up the chain. This may sound like a radical shift in modern consumer culture. In fact, its roots are in older ways of doing business, when responsibility was a practical and commercial necessity.
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Not so long ago, glass bottles were delivered to the doorstep, collected when empty, sterilised and sent out again. This wasn’t designed as an environmental scheme; it was simply the most efficient way to distribute milk. But it created a circular system in which responsibility for packaging was retained by the producer, not the consumer or government. What policymakers are now calling extended producer responsibility is, in many respects, a return to habits my grandparents practised as a matter of course.
The difficulty is that today’s products are vastly more complex. It is easy enough to rinse and reuse a glass bottle. It is rather more difficult to disassemble a smartphone into its dozens of component metals and rare earths, or to recycle a composite plastic film that keeps a sandwich fresh but is impossible to separate into usable fractions.
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That is why regulations now focus not just on cost-shifting but on product design and why extended producer responsibility must go hand in hand with transparency. If companies are required to report what materials they use and how they are recovered, it becomes harder to hide behind greenwashed marketing or marginal improvements.
Waste doesn’t disappear with the recycling bins; it only moves somewhere else. The question is whether the burden should lie with the end consumer, the local authority, or the producer who designed the product in the first place. The milkman knew the answer. It’s time the rest of us caught up.
Stuart Mathieson is research manager with InterTradeIreland
