Whether voluntary or mandatory, take-back initiatives place the responsibility of product disposal on the product manufacturer. In the case of end-of-life vehicle management, product take-back creates an incentive for designers to develop products that are reusable, made of recycled materials, and are recyclable.

German auto manufacturers set an admirable example in 1996 with a voluntary take-back initiative. In response to the German government's proposed mandatory take-back legislation – the "scrap car rule" – the automotive industry launched an aggressive effort to increase recycling in order to demonstrate that a voluntary approach by the industry could achieve desirable goals. Satisfied with this idea, the German government and the automotive industry agreed to a "voluntary pledge regarding the environmentally compatible management of end-of-life vehicles." With this pledge, German auto manufacturers have challenged standard practices of vehicle salvage and recovery, as well as vehicle design.

The voluntary pledge states that the industry will reduce the amount of auto shredder residue (ASR, or "fluff") sent to landfills from the current rate of 25 percent (by vehicle weight) to a maximum of 15 percent by 2002, and a maximum of 5 percent by 2015. Unfortunately, however, one of the options to achieve these goals is incineration, in order to recover energy, which may under-cut more beneficial incentives such as Design-for-Recyclability. A draft directive now being proposed by the European Union contains many aspects of the German pledge, but would curtail the use of incineration to meet recycling goals.

In the United States, take-back initiatives have not taken root; indeed federal EPR legislation and policy have thus far been defeated. There are, however, isolated voluntary initiatives by the U.S. automotive industry. The bumper take-back programs of the Ford Motor Company and Saturn (a subsidiary of General Motors Corporation) are the two examples most often cited. Although these projects are indeed take-back initiatives, they have little impact on the resource-consumption and waste-management issues created by current vehicle recycling practices in the United States. Bumpers, for instance, are only a small part of the ASR problem and because vehicle manufacturers are not responsible for the disposal of the entire vehicle, feedback loops that would influence whole vehicle design are limited. If the German voluntary pledge were adopted in the United States, the significance of ASR and its associated resource-consumption and waste-management issues would be substantially diminished.

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