Extended producer responsibility: Moving from end-of-life management towards public-private commitment to innovation in product life-cycles

In this article we discuss experiences with the application of the principle of Producer Responsibility in the Netherlands. It has proved possible to reach agreements between government and producers on a major shift of responsibilities for the most important waste streams. The impact on efforts to close material cycles are clearly visible. The implementation of Producer Responsibility is still confined to the waste stage. Nowadays, the challenge is to enable and motivate producers to work at the level of the entire life-cycle of products on the continuous and ambitious improvement of environmental performance. For this, we propose a five-stage strategy which aims at formulating future scenarios for product groups in dialogue with the producers concerned.