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 Institute

Every day we each use

hundreds of products

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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.

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Many of these products – and their packaging

– impact the environment and health in unintended

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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!

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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.

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

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.

Some products are associated with other unintended impacts…such as drug abuse or hazards to workers…

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

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Today, we look to local

governments to manage this

increasingly complex waste stream…

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This costs money! In 2009, Nebraska spent an estimated $2 million tax dollars to manage household hazardous waste…

…and they weren’t able to collect all the problematic product & packaging waste that was out there.

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Government and

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taxpayers can’t solve this problem alone…