Extended producer responsibility:
on paper and in practice

The global EPR landscape

Legal status of EPR, recycling rate, and governance by country.

EPR, governance and recycling

Adopting EPR is not by itself associated with higher recycling. In the pooled sample, higher recycling appears only where binding EPR coincides with strong governance, and the association does not hold within income groups or within groups of similar collection coverage.

Development reshapes the waste

With income, the share of organics falls and the packaging-relevant share of municipal waste (paper, plastic, glass, metal) doubles.

Where the waste of 2050 will arise

Tiles are sized by projected 2050 municipal waste and colored by current EPR status.

The WEEE gap

Electronic waste grows with income. Open circles are countries without WEEE-specific EPR; bubble area is national tonnage.

Country profile

EPR status, governance, and collection coverage of a country, and its position on the pooled association of EPR with recycling.

The association is estimated on a cross-section of 119 countries. It is not a causal effect and does not hold within income groups, so the profile describes a position and does not predict an outcome.

Data sources

The analysis combines six sources of data. The adoption years of EPR schemes were compiled for this study from national legislation; the second table gives the legal instrument and its sources for each country.

Legal instruments and sources of the adoption years

The 91 EPR countries of the regression sample. Instrument: the first instrument that places end-of-life responsibility on producers or importers. Where an earlier deposit, levy, or policy instrument precedes the first instrument framed as producer responsibility, both are listed. Each source opens in a new tab; its full reference shows when the pointer rests on it. Table S4 of the article.