Theme 4 — Fees and economic impacts¶
EPR moves money. It moves it from producers to compliance bodies, from compliance bodies to collectors and municipalities, and — to a degree nobody has satisfactorily measured — from producers to consumers and from municipal budgets back to ratepayers.
This theme follows the money at each link. It covers how fees are set and why they vary twenty-three-fold across a single legal framework, what the pass-through evidence actually supports, whether the instrument is regressive, whether municipalities and households save, how much revenue free-riding costs, and who captures commodity value when markets move.
The articles¶
4.1
How are fees set, and how do they compare?¶
A twenty-three-fold plastics fee spread across the EU-27, and the four causes of dispersion — none of which is scheme quality. Fee level does not predict performance.
4.2
Who ultimately bears EPR costs? Pass-through¶
The incidence question, the modelling that dominates it, and why cost claims ranging from $48 to $600 per household decided a legislative outcome in New York.
4.3
Is EPR regressive?¶
Packaging-intensive goods take a larger share of low-income budgets, so any cost that reaches shelf prices is regressive in incidence — the contested question is how much reaches them.
4.4
Do municipalities — and households — save money?¶
The least-studied question in the field. Washington State's billing architecture is the first design anywhere that guarantees a household saving would be observable.
4.5
How large is the free-riding problem?¶
Producers who supply the market without registering shift cost onto those who comply. Germany's 2019 registry reform is the reference response.
4.6
What happens to commodity revenue?¶
Who carries commodity price risk determines who absorbs a market collapse — and it is a design choice, made differently across jurisdictions.
What this theme establishes¶
- Fee levels are not comparable across jurisdictions without knowing the cost-coverage denominator.
- Neither the claim that costs reach households nor the claim that savings do has been demonstrated.
- Cost claims with weak evidentiary basis have decided at least one major legislative outcome.
Part of The Packaging EPR Library. Method and source rules are set out under Sources and method.