Organizational Challenges of Extended Producer Responsibility : an Analysis of Producer Responsibility Organizations

This dissertation analyzes Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs) as central organizational instruments in the implementation of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in Europe. EPR aims to internalize end-of-life externalities by transferring to producers the financial and sometimes operational responsibility for waste management. This transfer redefines the boundaries of responsibility and gives rise to new, often complex, organizational arrangements, of which PROs are the embodiment. The dissertation adopts an organizational economics perspective, drawing on incentive theory, institutional analysis, and industrial organization to understand how PROs structure their organizational choices in response to the institutional and operational constraints of EPR. Chapter I lays the theoretical and empirical foundations, articulating the economic, political, and organizational issues related to EPR, with a focus on the WEEE sector. Chapter II shows that PRO design choices (ex ante financing, cost pooling, flat-rate fees) create an informational lock-in that neutralizes incentives for eco-design. Chapter III develops a typology of PROs based on European data and highlights differentiated performance depending on the degree of organizational integration. Chapter IV adopts an industrial economics perspective and shows that the generalization of multi-product PROs leads to inefficiencies linked to the heterogeneity of waste streams. The dissertation concludes that PRO organizational choices are neither neutral nor secondary: they shape incentives, structure interactions among actors, and determine the overall performance of EPR systems. It calls for rethinking regulation by fully integrating the organizational and sectoral dimensions of EPR schemes.