Environmental policymakers have increasingly turned their attention to the environmental impacts of products. One concept—extended producer responsibility (EPR)—has captured the hearts of policymakers globally. Extended Producer Responsibility is a strategy designed to promote the integration of environmental costs associated with products throughout their life cycles into the market price of the products.EPR policies generally impose a fee that is paid by manufacturers for targeted products, and establish specific take-back goals for each targeted material or product. If manufacturers pay for the post-consumer impacts of products, they will design them differently to reduce waste. But other opportunities to more fully include environmental values into product-design decisions exist, and their lack of realization should not be deemed market failure, but rather a natural consequence of the complexity of the design, production, and distribution of good and services, the physical impossibility of vigorously pursuing all values simultaneously, and the continual emergence of new values. This paper focuses on the possibilities for the EPR principle to promote design change of products. A principal reason for allocating responsibility to producers is their capacity to make changes at source to reduce the environmental impacts of their product throughout its life cycle. It is essentially the producers that decide the features of the products they manufacture at the design phase of products. Rational manufacturers, when made responsible for end-of-life management of their products financially and physically, would presumably try to find a way to minimize the costs associated with end-of life management by changing the design of their products.Most proponents of EPR assume that current product-design practices deter efficient resource use and don’t adequately mitigate environmental impacts. Yet product-design trends belie this assertion. Manufacturers are moving toward reduced materialuse per unit of output, reduced energy use in making and delivering each product, and improved product performance—including environmental performance.