1. What is product stewardship?
2. Why is King County interested in product stewardship?

1. What is Product Stewardship?

Product Stewardship is an environmental management strategy that means whoever designs, produces, sells, or uses a product takes responsibility for minimizing the product's environmental impact throughout all stages of the products' life cycle. The greatest responsibility lies with whoever has the most ability to affect the lifecycle environmental impacts of the product.

2. Why is King County interested in product stewardship?

There are three main reasons why King County is interested in promoting product stewardship:

1) Reducing the cost to local government of waste disposal
2) Reducing product toxicity
3) Increasing resource conservation

Product stewardship provides a way to reduce the potential cost to our ratepayers for handling the cost of spent products by placing more responsibility on manufacturers to design products that can be disassembled for recycling and to give forethought into how spent products should be collected.