International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

What is often reported in the literature is the cost of the producer responsibility
scheme, sometimes referred to as the ‘financing need’, but the reality is that the
costs of collection, sorting and reprocessing have to be shouldered by somebody, and
the manner of implementation of producer responsibility, whilst it may affect the
costs of implementation, probably has the most significant effect on the distribution
of these costs across households / local authorities / businesses (those who pay for
the collection of waste) and the obligated companies (those whose responsibility it is
to demonstrate compliance). In essence, whatever the costs of the system, those
which are not borne by ‘producers’ will have to be borne by other actors.
The key financial actors are the waste collector and the producer responsibility
organisation (representing the packaging manufacturers and ‘users’). In the German
example, the waste collection is wholly paid for by the producer responsibility
organisation (based on the fees charged to the manufacturers and users). The DSD’s
18,560 members paid 540 million Euros (£377.6 million) in 2003. With DSD
receiving Green Dot fees for 4,495,692 tonnes of packaging waste, this makes for an
average of over €120 per tonne. This figure includes the income from recycled
material. Costs (licence fees) payable to DSD for packaging produced or sold in
Germany are shown in Figure 13-4.
In schemes such as the Japanese one, the collection is done at a cost to the
municipality and a share of the recycling cost is borne by the producer responsibility
organisation (to bridge the gap between the cost of the recycling process and the
value of the recyclate).
In schemes such as that operated in the UK, the vast majority of the cost of
household collection is borne by taxpayers, whilst obligated companies contribute a
fraction of the cost of collecting, sorting and reprocessing the material. The
Table 13-7 shows the fees levied by material in some of the Green Dot schemes in
Europe, all expressed in Euros per tonne. Where the producer responsibility scheme
pays 100% of the collection and sorting of household waste there are generally higher
fees to pay for these efforts. In addition, one notes that the fees tend to follow the
relative costs of collection. Plastics, being a low bulk density material, and typically
requiring post-collection sorting, are relatively more expensive to collect, even taking
into account the relatively high revenues which can be obtained from sales of sorted
polymers. In all countries shown, the fees for plastic are high, whereas the fees for
glass are much lower, reflecting the lower costs, and in many parts of Europe, the
reduced necessity for colour sorting and / or the potential to collect high proportions
of glass through bring schemes.
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