The setting of ecodesign standards to promote improved waste recycling

The underpinning idea of extended producer responsibility rules has been to provide incentives for manufacturers to design products that are easy to recycle. However, current incentives for design for recycling are limited, due to the problems in assigning costs for collection and recycling of individual products to the relevant producers. An alternative way to promote design for recycling, or to increase recycling, is to use mandatory standards for ecodesign, or stipulate that recycled materials must be used in new products. The European Union’s Ecodesign Directive has mainly been used to regulate the energy efficiency of products, but there is now interest in using the Directive to trigger resource efficiency and design for recycling. In this contribution we look at potential ecodesign standards, and discuss how requirements on recycled content could be applied to trigger high quality recycling of plastic waste from electrical and electronic equipment. We further discuss the need to engage several actors throughout product chains, and whether market dynamics should be a decisive factor when deciding on whether mandatory regulation is necessary or not.