THE COMPARISON STUDY OF THE EXTENDED PRODUCER RESPONSIBILITY SYSTEMS FOR WEEE RECYCLING IN TWO CHINESE SOCIETIES: TAIWAN AND CHINA

摘要

Starting January 2011, the potentially largest home appliance market in the world, China, will adopt the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for its increasingly serious waste problem. For the unique social and economic conditions like China, the EPR system should be different from those implemented in developed countries. Therefore, from the similar cultural perspective, our goal in this paper is to propose a model of EPR that can suit the complicated situation in China. In another Chinese society, Taiwan's Environmental Protection Administration (Taiwan EPA) has been in charge of the recycling duty for 14 categories of domestic Due-Recycled waste in Taiwan Since 1998, including home appliances and information technology (IT) products. The national recycling scheme, also an EPR system is working by collecting the collection-disposal-treatment fees, or "recycling fees," from producers to subsidize the registered recyclers for their recycling efforts. In the past eleven years, the performance of collection and treatment has been concerned by many parties including Taiwan EPA itself. We also examined the environmental performance of the recycling fee system for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). Based on intensive interviews and discussion with major producers in Taiwan in 2008, this paper thus proposes an ideal model for Taiwan's WEEE recycling system, a Private Recycling Organization (PRO) including the statute of the system, the material flows, the monetary flows, the auditing and reporting mechanism, and, the environmental performance standards (Figure 1). Hopefully this model can also be applicable to China. Since the EPR systems have been an internationally recognized concept for a nation's recycling policy, the more critical issue of the EPR systems would be how to optimize the environmental at a well-operated financial scheme. In both Chinese societies, especially in China, we suggest the responsibility of producers should be more enhanced to allow more flexibility achieving a better environmental status.