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Sustainable Industrial Design and Waste Management
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their products have caused to the environment. This will give producers the
incentive to change the design of their products and take into consideration
the “recyclability” of these products when they are disposed of as waste. The
number of components as well as the amount and types of material used can
then be reduced. According to Riddick, “Producer Responsibility can also
address cradle to grave environmental problems” by encouraging reductions
in the use of natural resources, extension of the product’s lifetime, and proper
management of the product at the end of its useful life through recovery or
recycling. A key objective of this principle is to include the cost of use and dis-
posal of products together with the cost of manufacturing in the total cost of
the consumer product. He further explained that there are a range of policy
instruments that governments can use to apply the principle of producer respon-
sibility mechanism; it depends on the priority of the government whether it is
sustainable development, product policy, or waste management.
Extended producer responsibility (EPR) was also defined by McKerlie
et al. (2005) as “a policy measure that recognizes the producer’s role in reduc-
ing the impacts of their product throughout its entire life cycle, including
waste management or recovery at end-of-life”. He illustrated the principle of
EPR in a form of a cycle that encompasses both the upstream and downstream
phases of a product’s life cycle. McKerlie et al. claimed that the producers
have the greatest ability to develop the product and induce changes in its dif-
ferent stages in order to achieve environmental improvements. He added that
enforcing the “polluter pays principle” encourages product innovation and pol-
lution prevention activities. In general, effective EPR programs can influence
the development of more sustainable materials management systems and
encourage Design for Environment practices such as dematerialization, the
elimination of toxic chemicals in products, and the reuse of products and
packaging. They stated that EPR has encouraged more sustainable packaging
design and resulted in significant waste reduction. Design changes such as an
increase in the use of reusable packaging, a reduction in the use of composite
and plastic packaging, and changes to container shapes and sizes have led to a
reduction of about 66% in weight of packaging waste to be landfilled and
incinerated in Germany. Although applying producer responsibility in the UK
increased the percentages of packaging waste recovery and recycling, it led to
some undesirable consequences: the amount of packaging in the market was
not minimized, recycling was favored over reuse, disposal of non-packaging
wastes was favored over their recycling in addition to problems regarding
waste collection (Riddick, 2003). Riddick finally argued that the application of
producer responsibility needs further modifications and refining.

1.8 Cradle-to-cradle Concept
LCA is a very important tool to guarantee there is no harmful impacts on
the environment starting from extracting the raw material (cradle) all the