University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

Commission, 2009a). Lewis (2004) note that for more than 20 years, the
packaging industry has been under pressure to reduce its environmental impacts.
Product Stewardship principles have been developed (PPRC, 2009) to help in the
development of voluntary agreements between councils, environmental groups,
organisations and trade associations on how to reduce health and environmental
impacts of products. According to the Product Stewardship Institute (PSI, 2009), the
principles of product stewardship are:
Responsibility: reducing the environmental impact of products should be shared
amongst the industry (designers, manufactures and retailers of products including
product components).
Internalise costs: the total product cost should include the whole life cycle of the
product from the resources use to the final disposal which should be minimised.
Incentives for cleaner products and sustainable management practices:
implementing and promoting policies that create incentives from designing to the
manufacture of cleaner products.
Flexible management strategies: effectively looking at ways to address products
environmental impacts.
Roles and relationships: the collaboration of all parties involved from industry,
government and consumers will help in the promoting the practices of product
stewardship throughout the product’s lifecycle.
These principles were designed to promote and develop appropriate practices,
creating an efficient and effective way of mitigating environmental and social
impacts in a products’ life cycle through shared and multi-stakeholder responsibility.
But it is not easy to interpret and hence operationalise these principles; indeed, Roy
and Whelan (1992) are of the view that the main components of product stewardship
are much less easy to define, but they suggest that these could include:
� Equipment design and material selection;
� Environmental impact of manufacturing processes;
� Logistics of collection at the end-of-life;
� Disassembly of equipment, and reclamation of scrap;
� Recycling;
� Economics of recycling;
� Safe disposal of any hazardous residual components; and,
� Communication with external organisations – consumer groups, legislature,
and industry at large.
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