ABSTRACT
The concept of producer responsibility whereby manufacturers of physical products undertake liability for end-life waste management of those products is a key step designed to bring those short and long-run equilibria into some form of proximity with each other. Producer responsibility or Integrated Product Policy (IPP) is far more interesting and significant in so far as it seeks to go to the heart of supply side factors by encouraging increasingly globalised and oligopolistic production sectors to undertake a fundamental review of the way their products are engineered, put together and marketed. The central challenge for industry is to recoup those costs in the selling price of its products without a threat to earnings. IPP achieves by the simple mechanism of obliging manufacturers of consumer capital goods for instance to incorporate end-life collection, dismantling and environmental neutralisation as another element of production costs.
