A major cornerstone of waste management policies in the last two decades has been the establishment of extended producer responsibility EPR schemes where producers are responsible for the collection and management of their products once they become waste. Although having been an important step forward in environment policies, EPR schemes have tended to focus mainly on the end of the pipeline,i.e. once a product has become waste, and efforts of industry and administration have been put in the development of collection strategies and in the development of technologies for sorting and recycling of waste. In recent years, the emergence of new paradigms such as the circular economy or zero waste has highlighted the need for revising the current approach to EPR. Waste needs to not be seen as a problem to be solved, but instead as a resource with energy and materials embedded in products that need to be kept in the economic process for as long as possible and at the higher level of quality. This approach is at the root of the Zero Waste concept defined as “a goal that is ethical, economical, efficient and visionary, to guide people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for others to use”. It means “designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them”. In the process to achieve this goal, the small fraction of waste that is not reusable, recyclable, or compostable should be reduced as much as possible but kept very visible to continuously drive efforts towards phasing it out. If a product can’t be reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned, or removed from production. In order to achieve this goal, work should be done at the front-end of the production process to design waste out of the system, and reinforced Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) has to part of the bridge between waste and products policies. The rationale behind implementing sound EPR schemes is that, with the extension of producer responsibility to all the phases of the life-cycle of its products, producers introduce up-stream measures especially through design that make their products more suitable for reuse, recycling, reducing the use of toxic and hazardous substances, and designing for easy disassembly and recycling. In parallel, end-of-life measures mean the design of efficient collection systems that increase current separate collection rates, enhance reuse and recycling and promote the most environmentally sound treatment of product waste.