The problem of high restoration costs of marine habitats damaged in the past decades by harbour facilities: Extended Producer Responsibility as an option

Most papers propose extended producer responsibility( EPR) as an incentive for the future development of cleaner productionprocesses. In this paper, we propose an EPRcalculation method as an instrument to collect funds to offset past environmental degradationsthat occurred before environmental legislations were enforced. However, often an unfortunate side effect of EPRis the legal disputes over who should be considered liable. To solve that problem, we suggest a scientifically rigorous method that identifies liable economic agents and calculates the apportionmentof restoration costs between producers responsible for direct environmental degradationsand their intermediate and final consumers responsible for indirect degradations. We apply our method to the case of fish nurseries – a marine habitat – that have been continually destroyed by industrial harbourssince the industrial revolution in the Seine estuary (France). Our EPRcalculation method should diminish losses of profit per polluter caused by the restoration costs. Such diminution is expected to reduce lobby pressures responsible for lower environmental targets in environmental legislations. EPRis also expected to preserve harbor activities that contribute to the general interest and generate a positive externality for climate change mitigation, justifying restoration costs to be borne by a larger number of sectors than harboursalone. In the EPRrestoration scenario involving polluters, users, users of users and final consumers, profit losses for the main destructorsof habitats – harboursand the mining sector – reaches 12.6% and 6.3% respectively. For the other sectors, profit losses do not exceed 3.4% (estimated with an input-output model).