Glossary
EPR
Extended Producer Responsibility
The principle that makes producers financially and operationally responsible for their products once consumers are done with them.
Under EPR, whoever places a product on the market pays for its end-of-life treatment. In practice producers meet the obligation by joining a compliance scheme, a producer responsibility organisation, and paying a fee per unit sold.
Those fees are increasingly modulated: products that are easier to repair or contain more recycled content pay less, products that are hard to dismantle pay more. Eco-modulation is how EPR turns from a tax into an incentive.
EPR schemes are national, so a producer selling across Europe deals with a different organisation, fee grid and reporting format in each market. For refurbishers this is mostly a reporting burden, but it also creates demand, since a producer that can show devices were reused, not discarded improves its position under the scheme.