About the Council

Defining Product Stewardship

What is Product Stewardship?

Product stewardship is an environmental management strategy that means whoever designs, produces, sells, or uses a product takes responsibility for minimizing the product’s environmental impact throughout all stages of the products’ life cycle.

It is in the best interest of states, local governments, industries, environmental groups, and consumers to reduce the adverse health and environmental impacts of consumer products. To achieve this result, product stewardship efforts aim to encourage manufacturers and others influencing the life cycle of a product to take increasing responsibility to reduce the impacts of that product - energy and materials consumption, air and water emissions, the amount of toxic materials used to create the product, worker safety, and waste disposal - in product design and in the end-of-life management of the products produced.

There are four primary reasons for instituting product stewardship policies:

• recapturing lost resources
• reducing the amount of garbage
• reducing waste management costs to government and ratepayers
• reducing potential harm from toxic material exposure

Is Anyone Doing Product Stewardship?

Many other countries are using product stewardship strategies to encourage environmental considerations in product design and to shift the end-of-life costs of managing products from ratepayers to manufacturers.

Product Stewardship or "extended producer responsibility" programs, as they are known in Europe, are well-established internationally. Over 25 countries have systems for managing batteries, paints, automobiles, tires, electronic equipment and packaging. The majority of programs are in Europe and North America but they are expanding to Asia and Latin America.

The government of British Columbia, Canada has proven to be an international leader in establishing regulatory frameworks that result in the creation of industry-run, third party organizations that manage specific target products. The British Columbia Industry Product Stewardship Business Plan is now available for viewing from the ministry web site and is a great resource for anyone involved in developing new product stewardship plans. Visit the product pages on this web site for more information on Canadian stewardship programs.

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