Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and Waste Pickers
Policy makers and civil society are trying to solve this problem through something called Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR. EPR holds companies more responsible for the impacts of what they produce by requiring them to finance, and often also manage, the recycling, reuse, or disposal of their products and packaging.
EPR has the potential to benefit the environment and to generate decent work in waste management. But for the world’s 22 million informal waste workers, EPR can be harmful. Waste pickers manage 30-80% of the waste in many cities, but EPR is sometimes designed in ways that create barriers to the participation and recognition of waste pickers in the system.
EPR policies and practices are growing exponentially around the world, presenting both opportunities and threats to waste picker livelihoods.
Since 2018, the International Alliance of Waste Pickers (IAWP) as taken a deep look into EPR policies and voluntary practices around the world, concluding the EPR is largely threatening rather than supporting waste picker livelihoods. Our work has included the establishment of a work group which developed detailed case studies and briefs on the opportunities and risks that EPR poses to waste pickers, as well as global and local training for hundreds of waste pickers across all of the continents where the IAWP is active. This resulted in our official position on EPR, which we are using to influence EPR at local levels, as well as in global processes like the UN Plastics Treaty.
Case studies
See EPR website for all the case studies.
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Events
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