The impacts of sustainability, extended producer responsibility and the circular economy on product pricing models

This paper examines product pricing in relation to Sustainability, Extended Producer Responsibility and the Circular Economy. Traditional linear economic systems focus on the use of mass production techniques to achieve the most competitively priced products on the marketplace. This in turn requires a large volume of resources to be consumed. The linear economic system is based on a closed loop system, where resources are used in product manufacture, and then used consumed by end user(s), to finally becoming waste products. Increasing consumption of natural resources, led to the evolution of (1) sustainability measures aimed at ensuring producers utilized more sustainable resources; (2) extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes which placed burdens on producers to bear an economic cost for recovery and recycling activities for products they manufactured, and; (3) the circular economy, which sees producers encouraged to design products which use resources which are capable of being used by the r-imperatives. The results show implementing sustainability, EPR and the circular economy measures do impact costs and product prices.N/A