YSE research scholar Reid Lifset, who has tracked a policy designed to flip product waste responsibilities from consumers to manufacturers, has built an open reference database to help policymakers and companies understand its costs and benefits.
Who should pay when a product becomes waste — the company that made it, or the public? That question sits at the center of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), a policy strategy that shifts recycling costs onto manufacturers to reduce waste and promote more ecofriendly design. Used in more than 100 countries for packaging, electronics, mattresses, and batteries, EPR is gaining traction in the U.S. Seven states have passed legislation requiring producers to cover the costs of recycling their packaging.
As the policy has spread, so has the need to understand its impact. Reid Lifset, a research scholar at the Center for Industrial Ecology at the Yale School of the Environment who has tracked EPR since the early 1990s, has compiled and published an extensive, open, online bibliography of EPR research and analysis. YSE News spoke with him about EPR’s history and potential.
The policy was intended to provide incentives to companies to reduce waste and pursue more sustainable design by holding producers accountable for the recycling of their products.
In addition to assigning legal responsibility for the management of products or packaging when they become waste, EPR typically includes quantitative targets for recycling, obligations for funding — in varying ways and amounts — of recycling and/or waste management, and provisions for monitoring and enforcement.
EPR has led to the creation of a novel type of organization: the Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO), which provides services such as collection and sorting of recyclables on behalf of producers as a group. The producers pay the PROs for these services.
There are many variants of EPR across types of products and countries. The variations are both a source of complexity and a potential menu of policy designs and outcomes.
Not surprisingly, it has been opposed by industry, including consumer goods and waste management companies because of the cost that they may bear under EPR. As it is designed now, if a company increases the recyclability of its product, it may still pay the same fees to a PRO for compliance services because the fees are typically based on the product’s market share.
It’s facing court challenges. I am serving as an expert witness for the State of Oregon in a lawsuit brought by The National Association of Wholesale Distributors over the state’s EPR packaging law, which took effect in July 2025. Also, a group of attorneys general from 17 states are suing the State of California, which is in the midst of implementing its EPR packaging law.
Its effectiveness is hard to assess because of data gaps and because its effect in the management of wastes — good and bad — is hard to distinguish from other factors such as changes in the economy, shifts in the composition of waste, and variations in its implementation.
To strengthen the financial incentives, a new lever is being introduced, eco-modulation, in which producers not only pay a portion of the overall cost of compliance with EPR but can reap some benefits or incur additional costs. For example, a producer can pay lower fees if a product has more recycled content, or face penalties for problematic design.
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EPR can be complicated to implement and there are a lot of moving parts to get right. I think the bibliography will be useful to policymakers, businesses, advocacy organizations, and other researchers by providing free access to an organized and curated compilation of references. It contains references to journal articles, books, book chapters, reports, theses, conference papers, and preprints, including both peer-reviewed academic articles and non-academic publications from governments, think tanks, industry associations, consulting firms, and advocacy organizations.
For policymakers, business leaders, advocates and other professionals, I hope the database will enable them to find and use research that will broaden and deepen their understanding of EPR, when and how it works, and how it might be used most effectively.
Funding to construct the reference database has been provided by the European Recycling Platform, Nestle Waters North America (now Primo Brands), TetraPak, Waste Management, AMERIPEN, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and the Hunt Foundation, among others. The database has been further developed and launched through the LIFE4EPR project in the European Union and supports the activities of the ExPeRt Hub.
