Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) seeks to internalize environmental externalities by assigning producers responsibility for end-of-life management. While individual schemes provide strong incentives, most systems rely on collective arrangements managed by Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs). This chapter analyzes why PROs structurally fail to generate eco-design incentives: mechanisms like pooled financing, standardized fees, and producer–operator decoupling create informational lock-ins that prevent cost attribution and differentiation. Framed through contract theory and signaling models, we show how these constraints yield a pooling equilibrium and discuss conditions for restoring incentives within collective systems.

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This paper investigates the organizational efficiency of e-waste collection under Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in France. Building on the industrial trade-off between economies of scale and diseconomies of scope, it questions whether generalist Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs), operating under territorial exclusivity, can efficiently manage heterogeneous waste streams. Using an original panel dataset at the departmental level (2009–2021), we construct a Shannon index to capture waste stream diversity and estimate its impact on collection performance. Results show that greater diversity systematically reduces per capita collection, indicating scope-related inefficiencies that are exacerbated in territories dominated by a single PRO. These findings challenge the regulatory assumption that concentration ensures efficiency and instead support more specialized or differentiated organizational models aligned with industrial realities.

Full working paper available here.