In a Next City article, Who Will Pay America’s $1.5 Billion Recycling Bill?, Matt Prindiville of Upstream provides this concise summary of extended producer responsibility (EPR)'s purpose:

The goal of EPR isn't to stick companies with the bill for waste disposal out of anti-corporate spite; it's to shift the work of dealing with disposable products from governments, who can’t do much to change them for the better, to companies, which can. "Stuff that has no value at the end of its life or that's toxic — those are design problems," says Upstream's Prindiville. "You can't fix those problems by having local governments say, 'Hey, how do we deal with these things?' You have to go to the source and get them to be responsible in designing products with sustainable materials."