Sifting through the rubble of the post Christmas slump can be a gruesome business. The pile of unwanted gifts, the undignified scrum of the sales, and the looming horror of January’s credit card bills are enough to weaken the resolve of the most dedicated consumer (unless you’re in the market for a half price leather sofa or bathroom suite, in which case your time has come). But this year’s comedown is especially grim, rounding off as it does a twelve months consumer guilt trip. From killer plastic bags to sweat shop T-shirts, almost every item on our shopping bill has been red flagged. Perhaps the nagging has been justified, but it’s a curious state of affairs when consumers are shamed into ethical self-audits but the industries that produce the stuff remain free to do business as usual.

During this year’s dogfight for share of the UK broadband market, Carphone Warehouse offered a free Dell laptop to every new customer. Punters snapped up the deal in droves, regardless if they needed a new computer or not. This kind of retailing, one might argue, is competitive supply to healthy consumer demand. But in an age when the UK dumps two million working PC’s into landfills each year, the practice is really nothing short of reckless. Companies that flood the market with disposable produce take no responsibility beyond the factory gates. In clearing up the mess that's left behind, it is currently the role of the consumer to bare the financial cost and the ethical blame. Why are the companies that profit from these transactions not made to help out?

The notion of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) isn’t new – it’s just taken an eternity to become law. EPR was born in the mid ‘90s, a policy between OECD nations with which to tackle wasteful disposability in consumer products. If manufacturers were required to take back and recycle end of life goods, so the thinking went, the enormous reprocessing costs would encourage companies to produce and market goods with a longer life span. EPR is taken seriously in some parts of the EU; in Ireland, suppliers are forced to take back and recycle old fridges whenever they deliver new ones.

Seventeen years on, this directive has finally become law in the UK. Since August 2007, manufacturers and suppliers of electrical goods have been legally obliged to take back products from customers, and reprocess the materials responsibly. In theory, the price that you pay for a product includes its safe disposal when you’re done. All you have to do is return it to the shop from which it was bought. Companies that supply electrical goods are legally obliged to inform the consumer of their EPR schemes. Non-compliance is subject to an unlimited fine from the Crown Court. If all this comes as news to you, it is because the Government has failed spectacularly to publicise this law. Unsurprisingly, British business isn’t in any hurry to promote EPR itself.

Try taking one of your unwanted Christmas gadgets back to the store it was bought from, and ask an assistant about their Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment scheme. They won’t have a clue what you’re on about. There will be no signage within the shop to help. If you do find a store willing to take it off your hands, it will most likely end up in the waste bin. The DTI’s virtual non-policing of this law renders EPR a voluntary scheme at best. And so the UK remains on course to dump another 2 million tones of electrical equipment this coming year.

Alongside electrical gadgets, the UK collectively threw out 900 million items of clothing last year, but the flow of cheap disposable clothes isn’t being managed - if anything it’s becoming a free for all. On Jan 1st 2008, the EU will lift the import quotas currently placed on Chinese textiles. A new wave of impossibly cheap jeans and t-shirts is about to flood our high streets, the scale of which we have never seen before.
If you caught your child buying drugs in the school playground, you’d naturally want to reprimand him or her for being so stupid. But you’d also seek due justice for the dealer - you certainly wouldn’t allow him to carry on supplying at the school gates. It’s high time that the public - titillated into consuming, then chastised for doing so – demand compensation from the dealers. Consumer goods mountains don’t pile up by themselves.