First EPR guideline marks a milestone

Anyone who has worked inside a consumer goods business in Bangladesh knows the discomfort of seeing your own packaging in a drain. Companies here have understood the problem for years. What has been missing is not intent, but structure, a framework that lets the whole value chain act together.

That framework now exists. On August 13, the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Guideline for Plastic Waste Management, 2026, was published in the gazette and came into force. EPR is not new. It began in Sweden in 1990, and some 60 countries now run such systems, including India, Vietnam and South Africa.

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Bangladesh has taken a strong step in joining them, with the first instrument here to place binding, producer-financed responsibility on businesses for the plastic they put on the market. The urgency is local. World Bank research found urban per capita plastic use tripled between 2005 and 2020, from three kilograms to nine, and reached 22.5 kilograms in Dhaka. Less than a third of the 977,000 tonnes consumed that year was recycled, and 12 percent of Dhaka’s plastic waste ends up in canals and rivers.

EPR asks for more than recycling. Producers, brand owners and importers, along with online platforms, retail chains and recyclers, must finance and organise the whole end-of-life chain: collection, sorting, recycling and sound disposal. We must also plan to use less plastic. It runs from design to disposal, where the responsibility has always belonged.

Businesses should not read this as one more regulatory burden. No company can fix waste collection alone, and however good our individual efforts, none reach the scale a national waste stream demands. A shared obligation is what makes that possible. Everyone works to the same expectations, and competitors finally have a reason to pool resources instead of running parallel pilots.

The Department of Environment and the ministry deserve recognition for how this was built, consulting over several years and bringing development partners, the plastic manufacturers’ association, activists, recyclers and businesses into successive drafts. The responsibility now shifts to us.

The guideline comes into effect in stages: large enterprises first, medium enterprises in years three and four, and small enterprises in year five. Targets start at 15 percent collection and 7.5 percent recycling, double by year five, and must be met within each of the five plastic categories defined. That gives large companies three years to build the system efficiently, so medium and small firms inherit something that works.

The EPR Guideline also makes a choice about the people already doing this work. Bangladesh has a collection system, run by tens of thousands of informal collectors and sorters working without contracts, safety equipment or recognition.

They are the reason anything gets recycled here. The guideline requires Producer Responsibility Organisations to bring them into organised systems alongside local government and NGOs. The government has promised green jobs. These are green jobs. They exist already. What the guideline offers them is dignity.

Reporting matters too. Companies must report to the Department of Environment each year on what they have collected and recycled, with the tonnage traceable. That is how progress becomes measurable rather than asserted. None of this solves the plastic waste problem on its own. Packaging is only about a fifth of municipal waste, so EPR adds to public investment rather than replacing it, and no EPR system anywhere arrived complete.

This one commits the government to reviewing targets with stakeholders after three years, and it will change as we learn. What matters is that plastic waste in Bangladesh now has an owner, and a structure through which the whole value chain can work together. What we make of it is up to us.

The writer is a corporate affairs and sustainability professional