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Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

This idea seems so sensible it's a no-brainer. (I'm almost dreading the comments explaining why I'm wrong!) The human race is producing unprecedented quantities of non-recyclable "stuff".

It's pumped out of the ground as oil, converted into plastics, and after a short life, buried in the ground again. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if much of it didn't also end up floating in the ocean, being eaten by animals and contaminating the human food chain.

The only potential counter-argument I can see with this sort of policy is that the goals of minimising CO2 and minimising waste sometimes seem to be in competition with each other. Anecdotally I've heard of examples where (e.g.) washing china plates has a greater carbon cost than using disposable ones.

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The idea is great. The problems will be with the implementation, how it will change incentives, any loopholes introduced, cost of enforcement and unintended consequences.

What exactly is a repair? Are parts covered, or only labour? Think ship of Theseus. Is an upgrade a repair, can I put a better compressor, rather than like-for-like in my refrigerator when it's failed? Can I have my TV repaired by replacing all the parts, except the power cord? How broken must something be before it can be repaired? Totally failed, failure imminent, or just worn? (Unintended consequence: people have their things fixed long before it's strictly necessary, leading to greater waste than if they'd just let the thing fail and bought a new one. Another one: appliances are only upgraded to newer, much more energy efficient ones much later than otherwise).

And for labour, where is the line drawn? Is the labour cost of diagnosing a problem covered? What if the problem is bigger than expected, and it isn't economical to carry out the repair? What if I have you upgrade the Foo (not a repair), which is trivial, while you've taken the widget apart anyway to fix the Bar (a repair)? What about repairing something, pocketing the tax break, then selling it (perhaps outside of the country)?

Once you have considered all of these questions, you either have a lot of loopholes which will make the tax break much more expensive, or have a very long body of legal texts, and some very exited lawyers and auditors which will impose an indirect cost on society broadly.

Sure, it's pessimistic, but I'm essentially working backwards from an attempt to impose a tax on dietary fat (for health reasons) in Denmark. Sounds great, right? Hilarity ensued over mixed nuts (the accountants had a field day with that one, and IIRC all kinds of meat being taxed at the same level, and the tax was repealed after only 15 months.

I'm pessimistic too. However, the labour cost is so huge that it will offset some of your points and only give a slight edge to repair and second hand shops.

If you don't have a top of the range, almost new fridge or TV, even phone, repair will almost always come close to replacement cost. And replacement give you back a 2 years guarantee with faster turnaround.

Right, but the point of this legislation is to adjust the incentives so that repair becomes possible/economical in a greater number of cases.

Aren't we about to be abounding with mechanical inclined labor? Like aren't all truck drivers and car drivers about to be automated?

This seems like a nobrainer.

Relocating that labor surplus towards supporting a repairable mechanical/technological industry and commercial future seems really plausible.

That sounds like a decent job, troubleshooting and repairing the machines, designing machines to be repaired. Better than driving trucks.

How much is is worth? Assuming every "fixer" is competing with some industry robots somewhere, what is the ceiling on the fixer salary?

I was assuming in our little hypothetical utopia that most consumer goods are designed once again to be repaired and upgraded.

I was also imagining a bunch of truck drivers looking for jobs, since the robots took them all.

Further along in my thought experiment, I imagined that if I owned a sizable fleet of robot cars I'd rather repair and upgraded than replace them.

So I figured if you're into trucks, have basic the mechanical skills required to drive a truck (tire chains, flat tires, oil change, spark plug change) that a new job maintenaning, repairing and upgrading the new fleets of robot taxis and trucks might be right up your alley.

For some reason self repairing robots seem a bit further off.

> If you don't have a top of the range, almost new fridge or TV, even phone, repair will almost always come close to replacement cost.

I tend to repair everything, and let me say that's not true for the vast majority of my possessions, including cars, appliances, electronics, etc. It highly depends on the nature of the failure, but generally parts are cheaper than replacement. Here are a list of things I've recently repaired around my house + the parts to repair. I don't recall the parts costs, but all were far lower than replacing the entire thing:

Dishwasher: Control board

Garage door opener: Broken gear and sprocket

Hot tub: Two pumps and a pressure/flow sensor

AV receiver: Three capacitors

Rear projection TV: Convergence ICs

Attic fan: Fan motor

And probably tons more that I'm not recalling at the moment. The key is to stop throwing money away on labor costs. Even getting someone out to your house can cost $50-100 and that's before he even does anything. Total scam. I disagree with a lot of replies here--DIY repair is still a viable option for most things around the home.

I suspect I will do much more of that after I retire.

It's hard to motivate myself to spend much time on most such activities now. Now saying you don't have a point, just how the day flows sometimes.

Each of these repairs consisted of: an hour or so of diagnosis/research + order the parts online + go on with your life until delivered + a few hours or so to do the repair.

I spent more time finding the cheapest (+shipping) online source of garage door opener parts than I spent on actually repairing it.

I find that repairing it myself is often faster than getting a tech out to repair things. It seems to be a minimum of two appointments, one to diagnose things and order the part, another to come back to fix it. With the wait windows the repair services want, it's less time to do it myself.

For something like the AV receiver's three capacitors or the TV's convergence IC's, how did you track down the problem and source replacements?

Are there debugging manuals for that level of electronics failure, or was it just "hmmm, that capacitor probably shouldn't have all the goo around it"?

Forums + Youtube + Digikey for most electronics repair. The ICs were a little specialty, I think I got them on eBay. For most anything once you get a hold of the part number, you're good to go.

My approach as a learn-it-as-I-go-DIYer is basically:

1) Google part number and the symptoms, half the time somebody has blogged about the exact same issue. These consumer products often fail in the same way.

2) Google symptoms and look for issues with similar products. Faulty capacitors for example is a classic cause of problems for older electronics and can be observed by just looking at the PCB (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague)

3) Debug using Service Manual (note the User Manuals are typically useless / not detailed enough). Again just googling your part number will typically get you a PDF. If you still can't find the Service Manual you can buy it at these sketchy sites online for $10US, or buy the manual from the OEM (typically closer to $50US from my experience).

4) If still not sure what's wrong, buy a new logic board

5) Buy new gadget

Warning - depending on which appliance is broken irritation level of spouse may grow exponentially!

A big pain for DIY repairs (at least here in Canada) is part prices and shipping costs. I often see a 2-4x spread in prices when checking Amazon.ca and Amazon.com (often will not even ship to Canada).

It's still cheaper (and more satisfying) to DIY but it really hurts when you're paying $40 for a $10 garage door opener part!

Maybe you'd have better luck with eBay?

Wait does any of that include labour ? Because around here you won't find a technician working for less than 50 GBP an hour, parts not included. Or well, you can always find a "guy" that can come around, no guarantee of anything.

That's btw my key argument. If you repair yourself or live in an area with handy undeclared workers, yeah repairing is probably worth it.

A alternative approach could be taxing garbage. Perhaps inevitable once sensors become pervasive and cheap enough. Too some extent this is already done and enforced for disposing of blatantly dangerous things. In some cases you could end up in prison in addition to fines, if caught. The more subtle things that add up to a big problem have been given a lot of leeway.

Right now it is profitable for many parties to extract non-renewable resources, assemble them in to something that has a short life cycle, and be sold to consumers who would rather keep buying the same thing over and over again than a single time. There have been big incentives on the government side for hitting GDP numbers, which has led to both low interest rates and an urgency to extract and process non-renewable resources as quickly as possible. Capital utilization numbers certainly doesn't account for any of this and very well exacerbate the problem.

I don't want to confuse cause and effect here, but the consumption of low quality products directly relates to the volume which they are produced. The actual costs have just been transferred to the future. In the future there will be both fewer resources to produce those goods and more pollution/ecosystem effects to account for it.

At Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder meeting this year Charlie Munger specifically said he thought all petrochemical reserves would be eventually exhausted to make things, not for fuel (there was a specific word he used which I never use and forgot.) Billionaires are thinking about resource exhaustion. Poor, uneducated people are not, unless they are still in hunter-gatherer societies and see problems first hand.

We often think of food and bio-products as renewables, but in many cases they are not. National Geographic (August 2016) ran a great article on the exhaustion of the Ogallala aquifer. California gets a lot of attention, but ground water is being drained globally. Longer term, there may be limits with phosphorus as well. Food production is going to become a lot more expensive, global warming or not.

I don't know about the returns, but Al Gore's Generation Investment Management philosophically probably has the right approach.

The flipside to all of this is that technology can make using the same resources much more efficient. My leading theme for the past 5+ years or so has been exponentially more efficient technology running head on in to global government policies -- of all political leanings -- of creating GDP growth at all costs. The two don't mix, and the results could be very ugly.

Currently companies externalize the cost of disposing their products. You and I having to pay a bigger garbage bill is not going to change the behavior of the companies making all of this trash. If it were possible to query everything that went into a landfill, and bill the entire value chain proportionally for its disposal cost, THEN we might start to have a fair system and see changes. Current incentives are to produce the cheapest thing that will barely work for long enough that someone will buy it.

Actually, they do. I believe at least electronics companies pay a small fee for every device to pay for its disposal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee

That's a pretty blunt instrument though. It looks like it just hits retailers, not manufacturers, and the fee is assessed regardless of whether the device ends up disposed. Seems like such a fee would serve only to make everything more expensive, instead of actually incentivizing the production of longer-lasting goods.

Another idea (probably full of holes, I'm sure): Tax manufacturers based on the length of their products' warranties, say 100 minus YEARS. So no warranty means company pays 100% of the product's sale price in tax. 5 year warranty means company pays 95% of the product's sale price, etc. down to no tax if the company offers a 100 year or more warranty.

Biggest problem I can think of there can be answered with most of the warranty repairs I've ever had done.

"We don't have any parts for your $old_thing, here, have a $new_thing"

Great from the consumer standpoint, but useless when it comes to reducing the amount of trash. And I'd be willing to bet that once something doesn't have any parts, it's not gonna be refurbished, it's gonna be scavenged for useful parts (if that's even possible), if not outright destroyed.

In California there's a paint-use fee tacked onto the cost of a gallon of paint when you buy it.

Of course, its main purpose is to pay for programs that safely manage the disposal of unused paint (i.e. you can take your extra unused paint to paint retailers for proper disposal.) But, this price hike should, at least in theory, reduce demand for paint a little overall.

>Currently companies externalize the cost of disposing their products.

At least Nordic countries have a system which shifts this burden to manufacturers or importers of stuff. It's called "product responsibility (fee)". (Producentansvar).

Small companies are excluded, the threshold is somewhere around 1M€ per year turnover.

Not sure if there is any EU wide regulation.I wouldn't be surprised if even some U.S. states had something similar.

>A alternative approach could be taxing garbage.

Ok, how do you keep people from dumping their garbage in someone else's garbage bin, or in some public place in the middle of the night?

This also doesn't really deal with the fact that different garbage has very different effects on the environment and society, and very different mass. "E-waste" frequently doesn't weigh that much, but has a lot of both valuable metals and also hazardous materials which can cause problems when dumped in a landfill. Mercury-bearing batteries are especially bad, but those don't weigh much at all. Some broken dishes, however, can easily weigh far more than old electronic gadgets or leaky batteries, but they're just pottery so they're completely inert and have zero negative environmental effects. And yard waste and kitchen waste isn't environmentally problematic at all, yet it can weigh a lot because much of it is water. It'd be better to compost it, but urban dwellers have no place to put a compost pile.

> urban dwellers have no place to put a compost pile.

Curb-side compost pickup.

Good luck getting the dysfunctional, incompetent, and corrupt local governments in America to implement that.

San Francisco sends its (mandatory) curbside compost up to Napa to grow our wine, and having lived through a couple ballot initiatives and largely-self-infliciated absurdly high rents here, I can think of no municipality that is more dysfunctional or incompetent.

I had no idea that we sent it to Napa. I'm guessing we get paid pretty handsomely for it?

My dysfunctional, incompetent, and corrupt local government (In America) has managed to pick up my curbside trash once a week, for years.

Over the past year and a half, it's also managed to pick up my curbside compost. It's also managed to provide both electricity, and running water.

Most of America isn't some kind of lawless hellscape, filled with wandering ghouls, cursed with a hunger for human flesh (Despite what Randian fiction seems to claim.) Mandatory infrastructure tends to work, for some definition of working. (Now, if only the same could be said about Comcast...)

>Most of America isn't some kind of lawless hellscape, filled with wandering ghouls, cursed with a hunger for human flesh (Despite what Randian fiction seems to claim.) Mandatory infrastructure tends to work, for some definition of working. (Now, if only the same could be said about Comcast...)

About half of it is. Visit the South sometime and you'll see. A lot of places still don't have recycling, much less compost pickup.

And as for mandatory infrastructure, the entire United States fails here: internet access is mandatory infrastructure in this day and age, just like running water was considered mandatory by the mid-20th century, and the US's internet infrastructure is pathetic (as you admit about Comcast).

Most of those places in the South don't have recycling precisely because they are too busy complaining about how terrible and inefficient and wasteful their government is, and how taxes and fines harm their freedom to throw whatever they want to in the garbage. To uncharitably generalize a bit.

There's that, and the belief that environmentalism is a communist plot, and that aluminum grows on trees.

If they wanted compost pickup, there'd be no reason why they couldn't have it. When you've solved curb-side garbage pickup, you've also solved curb-side recycling pickup, and curb-side compost pickup.

Comcast is a publicly traded firm.

Seattle does it.

The small (<40k residents) American city I live in already has weekly curbside compost/yard-waste pickup.

I live in Zürich. Here, you can only throw things away if they're in the proper bags, which cost about two francs for a 35 litre bag.

But taking stuff to the recycling centre is free, and there's usually one within five minutes walk of any given house.

The end result is that waste is basically self managed --- people are incentivised to recycle as much as possible and reduce waste. I remember hearing that disposal largely pays for itself, but I don't have a reference for that, so don't quote me.

(Fly tipping is basically unheard of.)

Many municipals in the US have similar policies with garbage, either pay for the special bags or pay per bin. Even at a small cost this often leads to dumping. I saw someone had dumped their trash in a cemetery. :(

Unfortunately, there is something far easier and cheaper (from the end user's perspective) to duming in a controlled landfill: dumping in random places.

It's been a long battle in many places to get people to properly dispose of their trash in a proper way, it's still way too easy to revert to prior behavior. In many places in the US, people have to pay a private company for disposal or haul their trash to a landfill (usually in more rural areas). So it's a very visible cost, making savage dumping more compelling.

Exactly this. We socialize the cost of garbage disposal in the first world to disincentivize dumping. Worth it, IMO.

Oakland, CA still has a dumping problem.

> A alternative approach could be taxing garbage.

There actually is a garbage tax (avfallsskatt) in Sweden. 500 SEK (59 USD) per ton.

This is in Swedish, but Google translate might help you. https://www.skatteverket.se/foretagochorganisationer/skatter...

> Sure, it's pessimistic, but I'm essentially working backwards from an attempt to impose a tax on dietary fat (for health reasons) in Denmark.

Sorry, what? Not to derail, but this is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in awhile unless I'm just missing something. The latest science has made it pretty clear dietary fat is quite good for you and simple carbs are what a healthy person should avoid.

"You optimize what you measure". Seems like incentivizing repair itself could lead to problems. Maybe the focus should be product longevity or components that can be repurposed, if the end goal is to reduce waste. In a totally different direction, share-ability could also do a lot to cut down on waste. There are a lot of products in the world where every individual doesn't need to own one, but only needs periodic access.

What I think is most sad about this is that we've come up with a material that can last nearly forever and is relatively easy to reuse and recycle (at least for simple thermoplastics like polyethylene which is what most plastic bags are made of), and yet we waste massive quantities of it. Biodegradable plastics just fuel the "disposable culture" and its resource consumption more, because they are deliberately designed to not last long.

I'm in two minds about biodegradable plastics. Where I'm from, plastic bags are no longer the norm for supermarkets to pack groceries in, and so most people carry their own re-usable bags to the store, or get goods packed in biodegradable plastics.

While this is anecdotal, it is common amongst my peers for the biodegradable bags to be used as general household garbage bags. I think this feels much better than using the previous long lasting ones, but knowing what people put inside them - I wonder if it really makes a difference.

On the other hand, I can remember when the plastic supermarket bags were phased out, and it was impressive just how quickly people adopted reusable bags. This small change in behaviour must come with at least some increased awareness of resource consumption, surely?

> Where I'm from, plastic bags are no longer the norm for supermarkets to pack groceries in, and so most people carry their own re-usable bags to the store

This used to be the case here as well (Slovenia), until supermarkets started introducing the self-service check-out machines. Those can't be used with re-usable bags (or sometimes can be, but with significant annoyance to everyone present, since an employee must manually check your bag).

Where I shop (Seattle, US), supermarkets have self-service check-out machines, and I've never had a problem with bringing my own, non-reusable bag.

The trouble with the reusable bag thing is that it takes about 300 bag reuses before the reusable bag is a win. Most of them aren't used that many times.

There's something profoundly wrong when it makes sense to us to extract oil from the ground in the Middle East, ship it to India, convert it into polymer, ship it to China, mould it into knives and forks, ship it to the West, use it once, and then bury it forever underground (or expend energy to smelt it down into lower grade polymer for use in something that will end up in the ground), all to avoid rinsing some metallic cutlery.

Not disagreeing with you, but this system does employ a lot of people in the Middle East, India, China, and the West.

If that's the goal, we might as well just pay people to dig a hole and then fill it back in again repeatedly, and it wouldn't produce as much CO2 in the end.

Or, you know, pay them to wash reusable silverware.

Yeah, but nobody in the west wants to do that?

I'm hoping for automated wash bots...

Some sort of machine... think we could have it wash dishes too?

So... a dishwasher?

Haha, yes, but with a little bit more of the pipeline automated. I would love to start with a messy stack of dishes on one end of a table, have the automation to sort out trash, then separate and rack silverware, dishes, cups etc into a 'dishwasher', then unrack it into a nice organized output area (where other staff could just pull clean items out of).

> all to avoid rinsing some metallic cutlery.

It's not that; it's that the capitalist/commercial way of life is naturally one-way: I sell you something and you go away. Anything after the sale is burdensome and unnatural, from a commercial point of view; so we get one-way cutlery.

What if it's actually tremendously efficient to do it this way, in a way that is not inutitive to the layperson? There are many many other uses for oil and polymer and shipping capacity, and the plastic cutlery industry can leverage these incredible economies of scale.

A problem I have with systems of such complexity is that it feels basically unknowable whether or not this is true. It totally may be. On the otherhand, it might just be that we're basically subsidizing an incredibly expansive practice by creating enormous and complex upstream costs that we ignore in our current accounting.

I remember reading stories several years ago of Scottish prawns being shipped to Thailand to be shelled by hand, and then shipped back for sale in the UK [0]. I have no idea whether this still happens, but I find it utterly mind-blowing that this process was the most efficient way of getting the job done. Globalisation sure does lead to some weirdly counter intuitive outcomes.

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1534286/12000-mile-tr...

I'm pretty convinced this is less efficient than doing it locally. The issue here is that when you talk efficiency, you need to ignore monetary issues - moeny is exactly the bullshit complexity that makes those things turn out so weird.

So let's talk energy. Does this pipeline - oil from Middle East, through India, through China, to the West and to the ground makes sense? Probably not so much; I doubt the oil extraction and manufacturing scales that well to justify shipping bulk resources halfway around the world. And definitely nothing justifies just throwing the things away after one use.

What makes things less energy-efficient is monetary considerations. The current chain of production is established on monetary efficiency - which is based on labor costs, transportation costs, etc., which all stem from trade deals and political power of different countries.

Comparing what we have with what could be, the real (and too often forgotten) question is: can we do better? The emphasis is on "can". Maybe the current state of affairs represents close to the best we can reasonably achieve from where we are now. I don't know. Which honestly makes me want to throw my hands up in the air and give up. I don't see a simpler solution than "invent free fusion energy", or something.

It is only efficient because of the tragedy of the commons; The "plastic cutlery industry" can rake in all the profits of the (literal) garbage they produce, but the whole society is left with the cost of disposing it.

One would think that having people pay for the full cost of garbage disposal would steer companies into producing reusable, optimal-duration plastics... but the most likely outcome of this would be a endemic level of littering.

Sometimes the Invisible Hand needs herself a hand.

>The "plastic cutlery industry" can rake in all the profits of the (literal) garbage they produce, but the whole society is left with the cost of disposing it.

Where I live, the one who bought the plastic cutlery throws it into garbage and pays the full cost for the disposal of that garbage.

And it's converted to energy, finally.

Non-petroleum based plastics are a thing, but lag behind in many areas like strength, injection molding quality, UV resistance etc.

Recently Lego decided on moving to plant-based plastics, but they expect to need more than a decade of R&D by a team of 100 people, costing $150 million, before these materials are up to Lego's quality standards.

http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i26/Lego-Replace-Oil-Based-Pl...

If they can figure out how to make the stuff out of bamboo, then we have ourselves a carbon sequestration method. No more global warming.

Bamboo is made of cellulose, which is not what you would want to use for making plastics.

The problem with cellulose is that, because it is fibrous, there aren't really any efficient ways of breaking it down.

Wood is also cellulose, but it is an excellent substitute for plastic in many cases (i.e. chopsticks and eating utensils)

For silverware at least this is available: https://www.bambuhome.com/products/all-occasion-veneerware-k...

Expensive, though, for disposable stuff.

If anything, it seems like this might be a reasonably untapped area for innovation: making repairs more efficient.

Right now all of the business and efficiency gains seem to be invested in lowering production cost, selling fast and hard to gain market share.

It seems like a way to make repairs more efficient could be a solid way of attacking a market slowly with a quality product. Slower growth but you build a brand for resilience and your market share is more defined by customers who aren't looking elsewhere than new acquisitions.

My school offered a semester course titled "Design for Manufacturability". We looked at things like lowering fastener and part count, to reduce assembly time (and assembly errors, etc.). It was taught by a part time guy who had a lot of experience with it in industry.

I may have missed it, but I don't think there was a similar "Design for Service" course. It's not been entirely ignored, there are makes of cars that mechanics hate to work on because service was not particularly accounted for in the design, and there are cars that they like a lot.

I'm up against the car issue in a big way. I wanted to change a clutch in my 06 scion xb I'd need to suspend the engine and trans separately to get at the clutch in the middle. That's 2 big lumps of steel hanging over my head while I wrench.. I can't pull the assessmbly out the top because it doesn't fit through the opening! And it's only by a few inches!

In my 1973 240z I can practically stand in the enginebay with the engine in place and if I want to pull the motor and trans it's a job a single person could do if they had practice.

It's weird

I'm not so sure. We must consider the whole lifecycle.

My buddy, with genuine compassion, recycles used PCs and gifts them to communities in the third world. I've read some pretty strong arguments that it'd better for everyone if they simply received the newest, cheapest PCs.

Sweden's efforts could help (symbolically) by influencing the design of future goods, to be more serviceable, upgradeable.

Not sure what service your friend uses for gifting his electronics to African countries, but I believe most electronics are sent to Ghana then burned for various metals.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/

He and his students are the service. They deliver the PCs personally and then hang out to help set things up and train the locals.

Edit: Ah. I probably should have wrote that my friend refurbishes PCs for donation. My bad.

> It's pumped out of the ground as oil, converted into plastics, and after a short life, buried in the ground again. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if much of it didn't also end up floating in the ocean, being eaten by animals and contaminating the human food chain.

Reminds of: "It's pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you're done with it."

https://goo.gl/photos/ccLCuPkvKh99WWvE8

If you do the math, it can be seen that a large enough software company, with a strong enough anti-recycling ("upgrade") program, could be responsible for more toxic chemicals being wasted compared to the chemcal waste from companies like Dow and DuPont.

And somewhat perversely, while a chemical plant's waste is concentrated in a single place, which makes it straightforward (if expensive) to contain and treat, the "industrial waste" embodied in consumer products gets spread across the entire planet, eventually landing in millions of unlined municipal landfills, bodies of water, and unsafe 'recycling' facilities.

The most straightforward solution would be a deposit covering the eventual disposal cost of products, which would then be refunded as the product was responsibly recycled (similar to aluminum cans in some parts of the US), but of course I don't expect to see anything like that in my lifetime. Much easier to pay lobbyists to allow you to continue externalizing your costs on the public.

>This idea seems so sensible it's a no-brainer.

I have not heard any "cut VAT" scheme that doesn't sound really sensible.

My suggestion would be to cut VAT alltogether so we can save our souls from endless tax cut jungle. But that's not going to happen, because VAT is effectively barrier against foreign goods, important source of government income and can't go progressive. As a result conservatives love it to death.

The reason governments like it is because it is hard to avoid.

If cryptocurrency gets big, it's the first tax everybody avoids.

That last bit says to me that we need to:

a) figure out how to make washing plates more efficient

b) extend the lifetime of plates so their manufacture is amortized over more uses

(Or do you specifically call out china plates because they are known for seeing so little use?)

> Anecdotally I've heard of examples where (e.g.) washing china plates has a greater carbon cost than using disposable ones.

Only if you use a dishwasher. IF you do dishes by hand, the only cost is water and soap. Strictly speaking from an environmental point of view the time you spend doing it would be considered a "gain" instead of a "cost", given that you will be probably not engaging in modern electronic entertainment for the duration of the task.

In an industrial environment, such as a restaurant, the cost analysis would be non trivial, given the more complex supply chains that businesses have.

I'm not convinced. Where are you getting that water from? Maybe if you manually drew it from a well...

Water has to be processed and transported to your house, and then heated. A modern dish washer is more efficient than hand washing dishes because it uses less water.

No. Dishwasher uses less energy, less water and less detergent. [0]

Of course things depend on your use case - if you really have just that one cup and spoon, then handwashing may be better, at least if you are happy with some grease left in the dishes.

[0] http://www.treehugger.com/kitchen-design/dishwasher-vs-handw...

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