Extended Producer Responsibility is increasingly the centrepiece of India’s waste management strategy across municipal, plastic, e-waste, and battery streams. Examine its merits, challenges, and whether certificate trading mechanisms undermine its core purpose.

According to OECD, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is an environmental policy approach in which a producer's responsibility for a product is extended to the post-consumer stage of the product's life cycle.

Merits of EPR

• Environmental Benefits - Promotes scientific collection and recycling, prevents soil and water pollution & lowers GHG emissions.
• Economic Benefits - Promotes a circular economy by converting waste into secondary raw materials, stimulates innovation, green entrepreneurship and formal recycling industries.
• Governance & Social Benefits - Enhances corporate accountability across the product lifecycle, encourages public participation through take-back mechanisms & improves transparency through digital registration and traceability. Challenges
• Weak enforcement and monitoring by CPCB/SPCBs.
• Dominance of the informal recycling sector.
• Limited source segregation and consumer awareness.
• Higher compliance costs, especially for MSMEs, which may be passed on to consumers.
• Complex global supply chains make producer accountability difficult.
• Risk of EPR becoming a non-tariff barrier in international trade if compliance standards differ significantly.
• Greater reliance on private players may dilute public oversight.

Certificate Trading Mechanisms Undermining EPR:

Producers may simply purchase EPR certificates instead of creating effective collection systems which can create a compliance-driven market rather than genuine waste reduction.

Activities like risks fraudulent certificates, double counting and greenwashing may increase.

Hence, it weakens the core objective of lifecycle responsibility and eco-design.

However, developing a national digital registry with end-to-end traceability of waste, Strengthen third-party audits and Formalizing the waste management system can help in realising the true objectives of EPR.