Product Stewardship

Product Stewardship
Product Stewardship is the acceptance of the ultimate responsibility for reducing the environmental impact in dealing with the end of life of products and product packaging. This environmental management strategy means evolving from a Linear to a Circular Economy where whoever designs, produces, sells, or uses a product accepts responsibility for minimizing the product's environmental impact, throughout all stages of the products' life cycle. Product Stewardship strategy adoption by individuals will influence product producers and governments to embrace environmental change. The recycling industry needs to be ready to accept the impact of the change in social attitude.

Online Collaboration Forum
We invite you to participate in the Online Collaboration Forum to promote the transfer of information about Product Stewardship. Please feel free to submit your input to the Product Stewardship Forum.
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Individual Responsibility
Consumers or Individuals have the influence to sway the product stewardship decisions of producers and governments. Individuals will be the drivers behind this concept with their desire to live a "zero waste" lifestyle. The adoption of a zero waste lifestyle is to reduce the amount one consumes and consequently throws away. A zero waste lifestyle focuses on waste prevention and encourages that all products are reused, re-purposed, recycled or composted and that no trash be sent to landfills or incinerated. A tool to assist individuals to waste less is available at Waste Less Lisa.

Producer Responsibility
Producer product stewardship spans the spectrum of the manufacturer's and wholesale and retail distributors of consumer goods. They all share the responsibility for the handling of the end of life of their products and product packaging once the consumer is finished with it. Each party is financially responsible to have a plan or process in place to minimize the environmental impact of their products and product packaging.
Manufacturer's are responsible for the product design and production, the choice of materials and techniques to be used in manufacture of their product, and the product’s packaging used for distribution and sale.
We are happy to see producer collaboration in efforts like The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, and we hope to see many more endeavors.

Recycling Industry Responsibility
The product stewardship Responsibility of the Recycling Industry continues to evolve. Current attitudes are moving towards ultimately handling all the materials that they touch.
No longer is it acceptable for someone to call themselves a recycler if their business model is based on cherry picking the most valuable materials and abandoning the residual materials.

The service aspect of the recycling industry is changing the traditional commodity based recycling business. Devising and implementing post consumer collection and reverse distributions programs to provide product stewardship service options are rapidly being incorporated into scrap recycling operations. Companies like TerraCycle are offering product stewardship options for Producers, Governments and individuals.

Government Responsibility
Product stewardship programs, for the most part, fall under governmental jurisdiction and generally rely on consumer-paid environmental fees or public funds.

Extended Producer Responsibility or "EPR" programs are being implemented to place full responsibility for designing, operating and financing diversion programs and accountability for the program's environmental performance, on producers. The concept is intended to incentivize companies to not only bear responsibility for, but actually reduce their product waste footprint through recyclable product and packaging innovation.

Social Attitudes
Around the world more scrutiny is being placed on environmental issues everyday. With the adoption of new Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards, companies need to have systems in place to ensure their carbon footprint accountability and management. Energy requirements for production and transportation of their goods need to either be minimized or offset with carbon credits.

By-Product Synergy is a member of the Cooksmill Network