> Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away?
Because if the cost is great many people will just dump their trash illegally.
Because if the cost is great many people will just dump their trash illegally.
I'm of the opinion that the effort should focus on making the re-use of materials profitable. Charge people by weight for what they throw away and provide a financial incentive for re-use/re-cycling of everything from food scraps to aluminum cans and you'll find that your trash disappears from the curb long before the garbage truck comes.
A significant amount of packaging could be reduced without much consequence on consumption. Especially for food. Grocery stores could use in-store branding/ads in place of flashy box designs. Plus as ecommerce/drones come to dominate, the need for flashy packaging won't be as important as website marketing.
Those risks IMO would be limited to a transitional period while companies evolve their industrial design. The bigger problem is that it requires a big behavioral change for both producers and consumer... it's difficult to make humans change the behaviour they known their whole lives. Consumers will have to make an additional purchasing investment (analyzing the disposal costs and companies would have to invest in industrial design and rethink retail marketing.
Much of current packaging is for retail presentation and theft prevention. Completely unnecessary for online shopping.
In fact, I just learned about Amazon's Hassle Free Packaging option, which I imagine is motivated by reducing shipping and handling costs. That package should be arriving today. I have the impression the product's original box is used, vs putting it into another, larger box for shipping.
The American diet is transitioning away from processed foods, which uses a lot of packaging. Kids, old and young, don't need every single thing to be a pretty cereal box or single serve container.
I think it would be simple for Amazon to improve this if they actually cared but for them it's easier to toss everything into huge boxes and let the customer deal with the fallout.
At least we have social networks to rage about it: https://twitter.com/stefanmajewsky/status/642356938324475904 :)
There's a TV that was thrown into the woods down the street from me. One of those large tubes. It'll be there for years.
Hard to recycle materials could just be taxed to provide an incentive to use other materials. The city I live in banned free plastic bags and it has significantly cut down on their use. There's no reason why that couldn't be the standard.
No, not if a good person like yourself does the good work that needs to be done.
Thank you in advance for being a decent person that pitches in anonymously to help the community in which they live.
https://www.instagram.com/p/4hTbWTAD5a/?taken-by=mmellinger6...
I become physically ill when someone makes the solution my problem. I can't keep up with all the trash in the world. It's like the world is run by happy idiots. Try looking around then come up with a better solution. By now these are circling our oceans:
https://www.instagram.com/p/4KXmvAAD7M/?taken-by=mmellinger6...
https://www.instagram.com/p/39AlorgD4n/?taken-by=mmellinger6...
People already dump their trash illegally. Are you arguing that whatever laws they're breaking should be repealed?
Instead, think of this from a goal based perspective. Your goal is to reduce stuff getting thrown in the trash.
Therefore, you want to encourage recycling.
Making recycling expensive harms your goal. You want to encourage people to recycle, not discourage. Don't do it, then.
Trying to force people to recycle doesn't work. It's economically infeasible to track down who threw that oil can in the curbside bin. Negative reinforcement being off the table, use positive reinforcement.
One problem with reframing this in terms of the goal of encouraging recycling is that I don't think that's a worthy goal, in and of itself. I'm pretty sure that some things, like glass, are probably best not recycled.
What I wrote was that, if people decided, e.g. that they really wanted to cleanup all of the waste plastic that wasn't already in landfills, then they should cover that cost. If the costs were really minimal (for whatever reason) that would mean recovering them from specific people or organizations less important. So you're right that it's not always possible, or even desirable, to exactly match costs to those imposing them.
> It's economically infeasible to track down who threw that oil can in the curbside bin.
Sure; but is that because the cost of throwing an oil can in the curbside bin is really small? If the cost of that behavior is itself small, then it can be covered inefficiently, e.g. by taxing the manufacturers of the oil cans or the oil. If the cost tho is large, then maybe individuals shouldn't retain the same latitude they have now to buy oil cans or oil without closer supervision or regulation.
> If the taxes are levied indirectly then there is very little incentive for any parties to change their behavior.
I don't care about any particular behavior per se [in the context of this discussion!]. If the costs of cleaning up people throwing plastic away are being met by a tax, why would one care whether plastic continues to be used for new items and people continue to throw it away?
It's possible that the most efficient behavior – in terms of physics – is to make things out of certain materials and then throw them away after some point. It's not obvious that reuse or recycling are always more efficient than simply 'wasting-and-remaking', given all of the other elements of our environments (like bacteria, fungi, ambient energy, etc.).
Because it's possible that the costs are not entirely monetary. I agree that there is more nuance to this debate, though. In my opinion one-time use objects made of plastic are appropriate in some contexts (medical care, for instance) and less appropriate in others (plastic silverware).