Today total material consumption in the US is 2.8 billion metric tons representing 10 metric tons per person per year. With about 5% of the world's population and 7% of the land area, the U.S. consumes one-third of the world's non-energy resources. The performance of the Current Material Flow Policies can be described as follows: 1) for supplies, the U.S. is dependent on foreign sources for 1/5 of the primary metals consumed. 2) The principal material wastes are mining wastes (2 billion tons per year containing about 1 million tons of hazardous materials), municipal wastes (209 million tons per year), and hazardous industrial wastes (41 million tons of de-watered wastes at 27,000 hazardous waste sites); the costs to the federal government are estimated at 33 to 72 billion dollars). 3) Environmental public policies do not perform well. For example, nearly all urban areas exceed safe air quality levels (atmospheric ozone, carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide) and nearly all surface-water bodies do not meet certain water quality standards. 4) The price to pay is very high if we consider that 100,000 deaths annually are attributed to occupational disease and 390,000 diseases to occupational causes. Private industry, the federal government and state governments are cumulatively spending about $28.6 billion per year on environmental protection and pollution control.

The University of Massachusetts' Toxic Use Reduction Institute would suggest a two-fold materials strategy for the future. The first part of the strategy concerns dematerialization. The goal of this strategy is to reduce the flow of material into the U.S. (by a factor of 10 by 2050), to increase the rate of metals recycling (to 90% of consumption by 2050), and to make a transition from organic chemicals to renewable sources. The second part requires detoxification, phasing out the use of persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic materials and reducing the use of all toxic materials (factor of 20 by 2050).

Product stewardship is both a product policy as well as a waste policy. It does more than recycling because it creates a new set of ''End-of-Life'' product policies. Product stewardship promotes product design changes that incorporate effective materials recycling and reuse in addition to product recycling. The result is a significant reduction in the negative environmental impacts of products.

There is a difference between Extended Producer Responsibility and Extended Product Policy. The former signifies a product-oriented principle requiring producers to assume environmental protection responsibility for their product throughout the product’s full lifecycle. The latter involves a ''shared responsibility'' among producers, consumers and government for end-of-life products. Tools for extended producer responsibilities are: deposit-based product return, product leasing, product take-back and managed product recycling. The University of Massachusetts' Toxic Use Reduction Institute also suggests different forms of EPR:

* Informative (informing users)
* Liability (for environmental damage)
* Financial (responsibility for the costs for recycling, treatment or disposal)
* Physical (product take back)
* Ownership

Some examples of EPR include a German ordinance on avoidance of packaging waste and some European Union initiatives including the Directive on Waste Batteries, 1991; the Packaging Waste Directive, 1992; the Directive on End Life Motor Vehicles, 1997 and the Proposed Directive on Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment.