What is the Problem?Contents:

These slides give a brief overview of the problems posed by the unintended impacts of consumer products and packaging.

Prepared by the Product Stewardship InstituteThis presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

Every day we each use

hundreds of products

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

Under the current system there is a lack of incentive to design better products

there is no cost to business to continue to throw away more and more material

there are no incentives to create products that

last longer or are

more easily recycled

Currently many goods are designed to be obsolete in just a few years.

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

Many of these products – and their packaging

– impact the environment and health in unintended

waysThis presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

For one thing, this results in a lot of stuff…

…each American throws away about 1,600 pounds of trash every year, much of it products and packaging!

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

When we dispose of materials, instead of recycling them, we need

to extract more virgin resources to make new products…which

consumes energy and can cause other environmental impacts.

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

Some products contain toxic substances that can be released to the environment in the waste stream…

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

.Some products are associated with

other unintended impacts…such as

drug abuse or hazards to workers…

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

Still other products may pose operational challenges in the waste stream.

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

Today, we look to local

governments to manage this

increasingly complex waste stream…

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer. This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

This costs money!

We spend millions of tax dollars to manage household hazardous waste…

…and still are not able to collect all the problematic product & packaging waste that was out there.

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.

Government andtaxpayers can’t solve this problem alone…

This presentation was prepared by The Product Stewardship Institute, an equal opportunity provider and employer.