A lot of questions have been asked about reduction, and I think you have to ask yourself what problem you're solving. If you're reducing plastics because they're going into the marine environment and they're a problem, that's a specific issue you're dealing with. It may be that you ban plastic bags because they're going into the environment and causing harm, recognizing that there's a trade-off that you're making with whatever the substitutes are in the short term. That's a public policy decision to protect the marine environment, so you need to be conscious of that.
That's a legitimate policy tool. For the broader scale of materials, if we're dealing with this 9% recycling rate—and that's going to waste and all of the embodied energy and greenhouse gases in it—we want to recoup that. That really does require looking at the different segments of the economy and saying, “Where are we using plastics? Where can we intervene with policy tools to change the flow of that plastic?”
Though not applied sector by sector in exactly the same way, EPR as a policy concept—if it's applied stringently, and I keep saying that—can be highly effective.