Applying EPR to packaging is a slightly different animal, Gardner points out, because packaging materials are commodities.
All of which is not to say that EPR is without its detractors.
According to proponents of EPR, however, without the initial government requirement as a lever, voluntary programs are unlikely to succeed.
Because EPR is not prescriptive about implementation, it provides incentives for businesses to voluntarily reduce packaging and get innovative with materials and design.
Paul Gardner, executive director of Recycling Reinvented, and a former Minnesota legislator with some experience dealing with EPR legislation, echoes that statement.
In Canada a close cousin of EPR called Extended Product Responsibility directs a shared responsibility between the manufacturer and the government to recycle.
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The EPR is the biggest plant ever designed and has safety systems galore, which means more pipes, more wiring, more concrete and higher capital costs.
But three of the applicants dropped out, leaving just the EPR.
Prindiville was involved in the passage of the Maine EPR electronics recycling law, and has been working on bringing EPR to the United States since 2003.
It highlights our credibility and that of the EPR design, as well as demonstrating that the UK has a credible policy and regulatory framework in place.
While the cost of EPR would be built into the cost of consumer products, the legislation would eliminate the fee consumers currently pay for city- or county-provided recycling.
Several NGOs had called on the army to stop patrols in Guerrero and Chiapas, where the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) operate.
The EPR is touted as being especially safe: if concerns about safety could be turned into a regulatory case for building only EPRs in Europe, so much the better.
Bottle bills have been extremely effective at increasing recycling rates, but Washburn points out that they only deal with bottles, whereas EPR gets at the broader issue: packaging writ large.
In 2006, Natural Resources Council of Maine teamed up with Hewlett Packard to pass the first EPR electronics recycling law, and since then 23 other states have followed suit.
For consumers, who, at the end of the day, are the ones that actually pay for recycling, EPR promises a more effective, efficient system, one that delivers better value for taxpayer dollars.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, an American ginger group critical of most real-world nuclear programmes (though not of the technology per se), prefers the safety concept of the EPR, with its multiple back-ups.
But deep cooling is invasive and complicated, requiring a trained four-person team. (Safar Center spinoff company EPR-Technologies hopes to develop automated chilling equipment.) Far easier would be a drug that induces hibernation on demand.
Finland and France, which produces more of its electricity in nuclear plants than any other big country, each have under construction a plant of the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) design developed by AREVA, a French industrial group.
The AP1000 from Westinghouse (now owned by Toshiba) is being built in China and America, and the EPR from Areva, a French company resulting from a merger between French and German nuclear-plant-builders, in China, Finland and France.
Instead the strategy is to roll EPR out in a few states, fine tune those programs so that other states have a model, and then watch the legislation spread, as it has in the case of other products.
Called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), this legislation would essentially set requirements for companies to collect and recycle a certain percentage of the packaging waste they generate, but would leave how they go about doing it up to the companies themselves.
Currently, organizations like the Cradle2 Coalition and Recycling Reinvented are focusing on outreach and education, talking to companies about the nuts and bolts of EPR and encouraging them to weigh in on what U.S. EPR legislation could and should look like.
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