Co-Regulation

Co-Regulation is a concept which entered Australia's Waste Management landscape in 1999 with the signing of the National Packaging Covenant.  It is an approach to regulation which encourages companies to undertake voluntary action to achieve a particular environmental goal and puts in place a regulatory net to catch companies which don't.  Co-regulation is based on the view that it is both cheaper and more effective for companies to identify which actions they can take to support the environmental objective.  The regulatory net is designed to provide an incentive to make the investment in voluntary actions attractive to industry.  Thus co-regulation is supposed to be characterised by large scale voluntary activity and isolated regulatory action to discourage free-riding. 

In July 2005, the Environmental Protection and Heritage Council (EPHC) undertook to develop a Product Stewardship NEPM.  The NEPM was deemed necessary in order to enable the EPHC to generate the necessary regulatory nets to support voluntary industry schemes.  The NEPM would provide a generic framework and the supporting regulations for each new industry scheme would be incorporated as a schedule to the NEPM.  For instance, a new voluntary scheme has been proposed by the Tyre industry and the EPHC anticipates that it will create a schedule to the Product Stewardship NEPM.  This schedule will create the regulatory net with which to 'catch' non-participating tyre distributors.  The EPHC provides information on the Product Stewardship NEPM, here.

As previously mentioned, co-regulation was proposed as an approach which could be used where there was support among a large majority of an industry sector for a voluntary scheme.  Over the course of negotiations with the first three intended beneficiaries of the Product Stewardship NEPM (the Tyre, TV and Computer industries), it has become clear that the Computer industry does not fit that description.  In fact the computer industry association covers only around half of market share for the sector.  The result is that the focus of the Product Stewardship NEPM has been broadened so that it will enable regulatory action to be taken against a much larger proportion of an industry sector, while still exempting those companies "doing the right thing".

2006 will be an important year for the Product Stewardship NEPM and the first public glimpses are expected around the middle of this year.