The Philippine Plastics Industry Association is pushing for a separate law on the Extended Producers’ Responsibility, instead of integrating it in Republic Act No. 9003, or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000.
“While RA 9003 is a good law, it has not yet tapped into its full potential, primarily due to a lack of funding,” said PPIA president Danny Ngo.
He said the EPR is an important policy tool to help meet national targets for the recovery of post-consumer waste for recycling. He said integrating this new and to-be-tested policy with the comprehensive and more than twenty-year-old RA 9003 may be premature as the latter is still being fine-tuned to address its lapses.
PPIA members said a separate EPR measure would be a more plausible option as it is patterned after those of highly-industrialized economies. “Hence, its success may not be automatic or immediately felt here because the Philippines is a third-world and archipelagic country,” Ngo said.