Product stewardship aims to reduce a product’s environmental impact throughout its lifecycle. By taking on the responsibility for those impacts your business can reduce waste and create value for everyone from staff to customers.
What is product stewardship?
Product stewardship is about businesses taking responsibility for the products they make, sell and buy so they’re not ending up in landfill. That means designing and making products to last, then putting systems in place to enable them to be reused and recycled when they are worn out.
What happens to products at the end of their life?
Every year New Zealanders send around 2.5 million tonnes of waste to landfill – that's over a tonne of rubbish per household.
Our throw-away culture is bad for the environment, it’s costing our country millions of dollars every year, contributing to our carbon emissions and it’s depleting our valuable resources.
Product stewardship is the simple solution. It starts by asking the question: “What happens to this product at the end of its life?” Sending it to landfill is not the answer.
For manufacturers and retailers that means introducing initiatives that include servicing and repairs to extend the life of a product and take back schemes so a product’s valuable materials can be used again and again.
For consumers it means choosing to buy from companies that are providing end of life solutions for their products rather than passing on a problem.
