Report: Developing Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging in Ghana – A brief introduction and status report

Extended Producer Responsibility is an environmental policy approach in which a producer’s responsibility for a product is extended to the post-consumer stage of a product’s life cycle. At its core, the purpose of an EPR scheme is shifting the financial burden of managing the relevant waste streams away from municipalities (and ultimately taxpayers) towards the producers, by providing a mechanism for securing financing for infrastructure investments and operational costs for necessary collection and treatment.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is today a widely adopted policy tool for covering the cost of collection and recovery of various waste fractions in OECD countries. Following an increased consciousness around the challenges of marine plastics, EPR as a political tool has gained traction in a number of countries, and is increasingly being admitted to government strategies around waste management and combating marine pollution. Simultaneously, multinational producers have made voluntary initiatives to limit the negative effects of the plastic products they bring to the market.

Also in Ghana, efforts are currently taking place to implement an EPR scheme. Due to the potential effect of conducive policies that contribute towards covering the cost of collection and pre-treatment, and thus the economic viability of a PtL plant, understanding the current process is of great interest to the Plastic REVolution Foundation (PRF). With the financial support of the Norwegian Retailers’ Environment Fund, PRF and its partner consultancy Norwaste have assessed the ongoing process and outlook for EPR in Ghana, and the work is summarized in this report. The ambition is also that this report may provide an overview of EPR and the ongoing Ghanaian process for the use of PRF and of other actors.

The report provides a general introduction to EPR, including the process of implementing this as a policy tool, and experiences from other middle-income countries. It furthermore considers the ongoing process in Ghana- providing a background to the context and actor gallery, describing the status of the process around implementing EPR, and providing considerations around the outlook going forward.

Read the full report on Extended Producer Responsibility here.

Picture by Etornam Ahiator on Unsplash