About Electronics Product Stewardship Canada

Electronics Product Stewardship Canada (EPSC) was founded in 2003. Our purpose is to advocate for a full-lifecycle approach to electronic products and related services, promoting policies and regulations that balance innovation, environmental sustainability, and manufacturing realities. 

EPSC has established product stewardship programs across Canada in partnership with the Retail Council of Canada (RCC).

Our Members
Become a Member

Guiding Principals

Guiding Principles for Provincial Electronics Stewardship Programs 

  1. Level playing field: All obligated producers participate in an approved stewardship program to maintain a level competitive playing field.
  2. Alignment: To the greatest extent possible, align provincial electronics stewardship programs to achieve efficiencies.
  3. Appropriate Standards: All recyclers used by an electronics stewardship program must be audited to the EPSC recycling standard – a standard that has been employed in every other jurisdiction in Canada that maintains an end-of-life electronics stewardship program.
  4. Environmental improvement: Use the program’s influence on the market to drive environmental improvements such as proper reuse, responsible recycling, and enhanced resource recovery.
  5. No cross-subsidization: Each product category is assigned only the costs of managing those products within that category.
  6. Operational efficiencies: Drive operational efficiencies by leveraging competitive markets for services and streamlining administrative and governance processes to ensure financial resources are used effectively and efficiently. Managing the consumer marketplace only and leaving the commercial marketplace to generators allows for greater operational efficiencies and maximizes environmental outcomes, including Reuse.
  7. Collective or Individual Responses: the program should allow the flexibility for either an industry collective response or individual company responses.

EPSC believes that the path to success for programs of this nature has been:

  1. Non-prescriptive regulation: Regulation is by definition difficult to change. A non-prescriptive approach allows greater flexibility.
  2. Industry lead: Industry should take the lead on the design and development of the program including product lists and definitions and timings.
  3. A phased approach: to timings and product lists.
  4. Leveraging existing infrastructure
  5. Funding flexibility: Allowing industry to determine the applicable financing mechanism for each regulated product to ensure the simple and harmonized management of the program.