Do eco-fees encourage design for the environment? The relationship between environmental handling fees and recycling rateshttp://www.mdpi.com/2313-4321/1/1/136

By: Dr. Calvin Lakhanhttp://wastewiki.info.yorku.ca/lakhanc@yorku.ca

Overview• Study undertook a critical examination of Ontario’s Blue

Box fee rates and their effect on recycling rates for printed paper and packaging

• Do packaging fee rates encourage design for the environment?

• Data collected for each of the 23 materials included in the Blue Box program

Methods

• Data taken from Stewardship Ontario Pay in Model (using all historical entries dating the past 14 years)

• Regression model developed to ascertain the influence of fee rates on packaging recycling rates

• Endogeneity corrected for by instrumenting one year lagged fee rate with current year recycling rates

Results• Regression results did not demonstrate an association between packaging

fee rates and recycling rates• There is no evidence to suggest that packaging producers are incentivized

to continue or improve their recycling performance under Ontario’s existing fee model

• Material cost per tonne and revenue per tonne were shown to have a statistically significant relationship on material specific recycling rates

Conclusions • Packaging fee rates have no discernable on material

specific recycling rates• Ontario’s EPR policy was designed to encourage design

for the environment by incentivizing packaging producers via a performance based fee model

• These incentives alone are unlikely to affect recycling rates or encourage packaging producers to make different packaging choices