If there is any single policy or regulatory realm in which the state can make its biggest contribution to creating closed-loop economic relationships, it is in Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). While many other players can and should be involved in EPR, and while EPR itself is essentially a principle that can be implemented in many different ways, nevertheless the role of the state is very important to key forms of EPR. According to Gary Davis (2002) of the University of Tennessees Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies, Extended Producer Responsibility is the principle that producers of products are responsible for the life-cycle environmental impacts of the whole product system, including upstream impacts inherent in the selection of materials for the products, impacts from the manufacturers production process itself, and downstream impacts from the use and disposal of the productsProducers accept their responsibility when they design their products to minimize the life-cycle environmental impacts, and when they accept the physical or economic responsibility for the environmental impacts that cannot be eliminated by design. EPR is a concept that was originally introduced to the Swedish Ministry of Environment in 1990 by progressive policy analysts and industrial ecologists associated with the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) at Lund Sweden (Lindhqvist, 2000). The German Packaging Ordinance of 1991, leading to the Dual System and green dot label, was the most visible early expression of the EPR