NWRA Issues Policy Position on Extended Producer Responsibility
Arlington, VA – The National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA) released its policy position on extended producer responsibility (EPR). Challenges with recycling have resulted in increased efforts to pass legislation at both the federal and state level advocating for EPR. While well intentioned, many of these bills fail to address the root of the problems and also overlook existing recycling programs and their achievements.
NWRA identified five significant issues currently facing recycling:
- Insufficient demand for some recyclables
- Low prices for the combined recycling stream
- Consumer behavior challenges
- Public concern over plastic in the environment
- Inexpensive virgin resources
“Americans want accessible and effective recycling. They want sustainable products that support the circular economy,” said NWRA President and CEO Darrell Smith. “NWRA prefers efforts focused on increasing demand for recyclable materials to allow market forces to incentivize recycling. Increased use of post-consumer content is essential to increase demand.”
The last 25 years of legislative history on recycling has been focused primarily on creating supply—without consideration of adequate end markets. Given that, our recycling system has been set up to continuously generate material even when demand falls and prices drop. Any legislation that proposes to address recycling issues needs to first focus on correcting this problem by incentivizing the demand for recyclables, rather than continuing to focus only on adding supply.
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ABOUT NWRA
The National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA) represents the private sector waste and recycling services industry. Association members conduct business in all 50 states and include companies that manage waste, recycling and medical waste, equipment manufacturers and distributors, and a variety of other service providers. For more information about NWRA, please visit www.wasterecycling.org.
Contact
Brandon Wright
National Waste and Recycling Association
bwright@wasterecycling.org
202-364-3706
