How Product Stewardship Schemes Are Designed
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A product stewardship scheme assigns responsibility for a product's environmental impact across its entire life cycle, including its eventual disposal, to the various parties involved in bringing it to market, whether that is the manufacturer, the importer, the retailer or, in some scheme designs, the end consumer themselves.
Scheme design generally starts by identifying which party is best positioned to reduce the product's environmental impact, often the manufacturer through better design choices, before assigning specific obligations accordingly, whether that is funding collection infrastructure, meeting recycling targets or simply reporting transparently on outcomes achieved through the scheme.
Some product stewardship schemes are voluntary, established by industry itself, while others are mandated through legislation, generally reflecting how effective voluntary industry action has proven in a given product category, since mandatory schemes tend to be introduced specifically in areas where voluntary approaches have not delivered meaningful, lasting results entirely on their own accord over time.