This chapter identifies the legal principles that conceptually enable the use of insurance instruments in waste management, focusing on four EU-law principles consistent with the study’s European orientation. Central attention is given to the prevention and precautionary principles, whose influence extends beyond the EU and whose core logic—anticipating and reducing environmental harm—supports a shift in risk governance from predominantly compensatory models toward preventive strategies; the chapter accordingly clarifies their conceptual content and relevance for insurance-based mechanisms. It further examines the polluter pays principle, operationalised in waste management as the waste holder pays principle, which assigns the waste holder responsibility for environmental consequences arising from waste handling. Complementing this approach, the principle of extended producer responsibility (EPR) distributes financial and organisational duties across the product life cycle, explicitly including the post-consumer phase in which products become waste; unlike the polluter pays principle, EPR assigns producers financial and organisational responsibility for products at end of life. Finally, the chapter situates these principles within broader policy frames. EPR’s life-cycle logic aligns with circular economy objectives of resource efficiency, recovery, and reuse, while ESG criteria provide an expanding normative context for allocating responsibility for environmental impacts. Together, these principles establish a coherent legal basis for integrating insurance into robust, environmentally sound waste-management systems.