Extended Producer Responsibility and Green Marketing: an Application to Packaging

This paper analyses the efficiency of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) to manage household packaging wastes. We use a Mussa-Rosen type model of vertical product differentiation: two firms produce a homogeneous good and use packaging to create a subjective vertical differentiation. We verify that an ERP characterised by a Pigouvian tax – producers bear the social cost of waste management – is not an optimal policy. We show then that an optimal policy is an adjusted Pigouvian tax, accounting for waste management costs.