Governments must balance their political and fiscal capital on the breadth of challenges Australia faces and do that in an economically and environmentally responsible way. To meet environmental targets, governments have many tools available in their toolkit. This paper outlines why regulated product stewardship has strong economic advantages over voluntary approaches and allocating government funding, which is becoming increasingly difficult in the current budgetary environment. Regulated product stewardship allows government to clearly define producer responsibility across the entire product lifecycle and set environmental and societal outcomes to be delivered in an efficient and timely manner. It provides an effective way for governments to achieve environmental and circular economy objectives including reducing pollution and carbon emissions, conserving resources, avoiding waste and restoring nature. Government regulations can either be mandatory or co-regulation with producers. Importantly, well-designed product stewardship regulation can also contribute to meeting broader government economic objectives including stimulating investment, driving productivity and competitiveness, improving innovation diffusion and enhancing Australia’s competitive advantage. While there is a diversity of product stewardship schemes in Australia, the majority are unregulated voluntary industry-led schemes that focus on diverting waste from landfill using existing pathways and infrastructure for marginal improvements. These schemes have had little if any impact on upstream interventions such as design for circularity to tackle waste avoidance and prevention head-on. unregulated approaches also enable free-riding and potential undermining by non- participants, causing competitive disadvantages for participants. By contrast, well-designed regulated product stewardship schemes (e.g. the national used lubricant oil scheme and state and territory-based container deposit schemes) have been far more effective in conserving resources, preventing pollution and litter, and avoiding waste by bringing about systemic change more extensively and quickly across the product lifecycle. Including changes, from design and production practices and consumer behaviours (household and business), to developing new pathways and solutions to avoid and prevent waste and enhance social well-being. The evidence in this paper shows why regulated product stewardship is especially effective in: • Stimulating investment: Regulation provides incentives for private sector investment, including in more challenging economic conditions. • Ensuring that the investment is efficient: Well-designed regulation ensures that investment is aligned with the long-term interests of the community, promoting long-run economic efficiency. • Driving productivity and competitiveness: Regulation provides incentives for innovation and technological growth, driving productivity and competitiveness