Policy Forum: Should Extended Producer Responsibility Programs Use Eco-Fee-Included Pricing?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs shift the responsibility for the operation and funding of end-of-life waste management programs for a wide variety of problematic and hazardous wastes and products from municipalities and taxpayers to producers. With the exception of a couple of programs in New Brunswick and Quebec, which are described in the article, the majority of these programs are funded through the use of an eco-fee-excluded pricing mechanism. Eco fees are collected at the point of purchase and are remitted to producer responsibility organizations, which have the legal obligation to manage waste and end-of-life products.The use of eco fees that are visible to the consumer has been controversial in the environmental and waste management policy communities, where there has been debate as to what is the best EPR financial mechanism to encourage producers to internalize the costs of recycling and end-of-life management and to otherwise improve product environmental performance. The debate about the visibility of eco fees has parallels in the debate that has been explored in the pages of this journal (and elsewhere) regarding tax-inclusive versus tax-exclusive pricing for the goods and service tax/harmonized sales tax.The author describes the discussions in both the tax and the environmental fields, sets out a number of policy principles to guide EPR program funding, and contends that eco-fee-included pricing would support the primary EPR objective of providing incentives for improving product environmental performance. At the same time, eco-fee-included pricing would strengthen the shift of responsibility for program performance to producers and would be compatible with a number of other EPR program objectives. It is suggested that the failure of phase 2 of Ontario's Municipal Hazardous and Special Wastes EPR program in 2010 points to the need for governments to look more closely at the EPR eco-fee-included pricing mechanism and at the programs in New Brunswick and Quebec, and to be more prescriptive regarding cost internalization by producers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".