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L'OCCITANE Group
L’OCCITANE endorses the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s call for Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging
L’OCCITANE today joined more than 150 leaders along the packaging value chain to support Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for packaging, as a necessary part of the solution to waste and pollution.
Plastic pollution is a clear example of how the waste and disposability inherent to today’s economy are fuelling climate change and destroying biodiversity. We need to shift the system, move upstream, and tackle the root causes of plastic waste by rethinking the way it is designed, used, and reused.
The signatories call for the implementation of mandatory, fee-based Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes to ensure dedicated, ongoing and sufficient funding to scale and operate collection, sorting and recycling of packaging, as well as establishing and continuously improving EPR schemes.
Group Chief Sustainability Officer and Global Head of L’OCCITANE en Provence
As a manufacturer, we have a responsibility to make change happen, and at L’OCCITANE en Provence we shoulder that responsibility by doing everything we can to collect and recycle all the single-use materials in our production chain. But we’re also convinced that we need to pool the efforts of both the private and public sectors: only then will we succeed in replacing single-use materials with recycled ones while also making our products more recyclable on a larger scale and improving recycling facilities around the world.
To stop packaging pollution, we need a circular economy where we eliminate what we do not need, innovate towards new packaging, products and business models, and circulate all the packaging we do use. But collection, sorting, and recycling of packaging typically costs more to do than the money it makes.
EPR is the only proven and likely way to provide funding that is dedicated, ongoing, and sufficient. Through EPR schemes, companies putting packaging on the market are required to pay for its collection, sorting and recycling after use.
For the first time, more than 150 leading businesses, NGOs, experts and other organisations from across the packaging value chain, publicly recognise that without EPR, packaging collection and recycling is unlikely to be meaningfully scaled and tens of millions of tonnes of packaging will continue to end up in the environment every year.
Download the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Statement and Position Paper here: plastics.emf.org/EPR
