Using Plastic Wastes to Exemplify Justice Dimensions of Extended Producer Responsibility

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) places liability, physical, financial, and/or informative responsibility for a product throughout its life cycle on its producer. Implementing such schemes is expected to result in many environmental and social benefits. Yet, academic and practitioner discussions on the mechanisms focus on environmental impacts, whereas social dimensions of EPR are often side-lined. This short communication contributes to addressing this gap by establishing a research agenda for the justice dimensions of EPR. For this purpose, initial links between EPR and justice – specifically waste colonialism, procedural justice, recognition justice, distributive justice, intra- and intergenerational equity, waste justice, and corrective justice – are set out, including where it affects products in their life cycles and examples of which stakeholders may be impacted, with plastic waste used to provide examples.