Product stewardship

For manufacturers, this responsibility includes planning for, and if necessary, paying for the recycling or disposal of the product at the end of its useful life. This may be achieved, in part, by redesigning products to use fewer harmful substances, to be more durable, reusable and recyclable, and by making products from recycled materials. For retailers and consumers, this means taking an active role in ensuring the proper disposal or recycling of an end-of-life product.

Those who advocate it are concerned with the later phases of product lifecycle and the comprehensive outcome of the whole production process. It is considered a pre-requisite to a strict service economy interpretation of (fictional, national, legal) "commodity" and "product" relationships.

The term product stewardship is often used interchangeably with extended producer responsibility, a similar concept. However, there are distinct differences between the two, as suggested by the semantics of the different terms used. While both concepts bring the onus of waste management for end-of-life products from the government to the manufacturers, Product stewardship further extends this responsibility to everyone involved in the life-cycle of the product: not only manufacturers, but also retailers, consumers and recyclers.

Examples

One familiar example is the container-deposit legislation. A fee is paid to buy the bottle, separately from the fee to buy what it contains. If the bottle is returned, the fee is returned, and the supplier must return the bottle for re-use or recycling. If not, the collected fee can be used to pay for landfill or litter control measures. Also, since the same fee can be collected by anyone finding and returning the bottle, it is common for people to collect these and return them as a means of surviving: this is quite common, for instance, among homeless people in U.S. cities.

However, the principle is applied very broadly beyond bottles to paint and automobile parts such as tires. When purchasing paint or tires in many places, one simultaneously pays for the disposal of the toxic waste they become.

The demand-side approach ethical consumerism, supported by consumer education and information about environmental impacts, may approach some of the same outcomes as product stewardship.

The American Irish-registered pharmaceutical company Perrigo has linked product stewardship and sustainability in the role of a senior manager in order to integrate its company overview of sustainability issues. The company has noted that responding to the adoption of EU REACH restrictions on the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances following new legislation in this field will require this type of overview and "singular vision".