La responsabilità estesa del produttore nel diritto ambientale europeo: genesi, trasformazioni, limiti sistemici

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) was originally conceived as a regulatory device aimed at shifting the focus of environmental law from waste management to product design. Drawing on Lindhqvist’s foundational intuition and on a semantic distinction between liability, accountability and responsibility, this article argues that contemporary European and Italian EPR regimes have largely neutralised that anticipatory ambition. Articles 8 and 8-bis of the Waste Framework Directive crystallise an understanding of extended responsibility primarily in financial and organisational terms, allocating the costs of post-consumer waste management without establishing a binding legal framework governing product design. The Italian implementation further consolidates this structure through collective compliance schemes and environmental contributions, strengthening governance of material flows while leaving design choices substantially untouched. The paper develops the notion of a “weak circular economy” to describe this configuration: a model centred on the efficient management of waste flows rather than on the prescriptive regulation of product form. By anchoring the discussion in the constitutional recognition of environmental protection “also in the interest of future generations”, the article contends that EPR should be reinterpreted as a vehicle of anticipatory design responsibility. Such a shift would require moving beyond cost allocation mechanisms towards legally enforceable standards of durability, reparability and second-life capacity, thereby reconnecting waste law with product regulation within a genuinely systemic circular framework.