Deposits at time of purchase have proven effective. Put a deposit on every product with recyclable material using some generic measurement (like “weight of packaging”), such that when you return it you receive a quick and approximate return (in this example, by weighing everything you recycled and just not caring too much what the breakdown was).
Every goddamn product is planed obsoletion so it can be cheap with a fat price margin and the customer has to keep on buying every couple of years.
Charge supermarkets for plastics and pay customers to return recyclable things and that’s a huge motivator to reduce landfill garbage in half.
I’m also a big believer that we need better robotics. When I saw Wall-E I just got super excited by seeing trash recycling robots.
Robots should be doing stuff humans don’t do, not replacing them. It shouldn’t be a zero sum game.
You need to be careful putting taxes on these things because of their regressive nature. Who winds up feeling the pinch when you add a $.05/can tax on soda cans? Does that person really have time to make extra trips to the supermarket to redeem a few dollars worth of cans?
Also while landfills are among the ultimate NIMBY things, we're not running out of space on this earth in any real sense.
Some things are just not worth doing economically. Maybe we should go back to the old ways and have consumers sort into only a few categories that are easier to manage - e.g. "paper" and "bottles and cans", and not bother with the rest.
The amount of garbage piling up on this rock is mind-blowing, and there's literally nothing we are doing about it once it's in the ground. It just stays there seeping out heinous juices into the surrounding area.
People are worried about tens of tons of radioactive waste material that we're sealing inside special containers and putting in specially designed vaults when hundreds of tons of trash are being dumped per day per landfill. I'm not worried about people getting cancer from radioactive waste 10000 years from now, I'm worried about people catching the plague from all the footlong rats crawling over their local landfill.
A proper landfill has multiple layers of protection to the ground below it and a web of drain pipes to ensure that the fluids don't collect up or, worse, leak out into the ground.
In rich countries the norm is all active landfills are properly maintained. There are a few bad apples that are caught once in a while, and a number of long abandoned landfills that cause problems, but for the most part a landfill in any first world country is not an environmental disaster.
In poor countries people just toss things wherever with no concern.
Where grocery stores take back empties, one just needs to collect the empties and bring them on their next trip to the grocery store, then put them in the recycling machine. You need to go to the store to buy more soda anyway, so it's not really an extra trip.
If anything, the problem in California (not sure about other states), is that grocery stores don't take back empties. Instead, they need to be brought to a recycling plant, which is usually out of the way as well. In practice, it just becomes a 5 cent tax since going to the recycling plant is an extra trip, unlike the grocery store.
If you want to sell a refrigerator with a 1 year warranty then it’s going to carry a $200 recycling deposit. Once you get to a 15 year, all parts (not just compressor), transferable warranty, the deposit can go to $0.
The sheer amount of cheap shit that’s built to simply self destruct in a year or two when it could — for 25% more cost — last 10x as long, that’s what drives me crazy.
It works out to be a regressive tax but appliances should last a lifetime not a couple years before breaking in a way where it’s cheaper to replace than repair. But since the durability is hidden information from the buyer, the market races to the bottom as long as durability is correlated with cost.
There are compostable alternatives to single-use plastic which with the right incentives will be adopted across more and more retail/restaurant. My understanding is that those compounds are only really good for single-use and aren’t durable enough to replace plastic in its many many other forms.
Of course, they could get scratched or something during use, but people could be taught it's better if you buy a scratched bottle than putting plastic bottles in landfills.
From your sibling comment. Just reposting since you might not other see it and it seems to address your question. Well, assuming these bottles are made from the same sort of plastic.
I don't know the numbers, but I would be surprised if more than 1% of bottles are discarded.
The same applies for plastic bottles (0.25€)
5$ to bring 15 bags 45 minutes away... I don't see an incentive here for people who live in rural areas, which is quite a lot of people.
Landfill space isn't free, so by diverting trash to recycling, your dad saved more than $5.
I'm probably being overly cynical above, but much.
I remember in the 90s, we would always trade in our bottles before we went to the county fair, and that was enough for admission and rides and some fair food. I don't think the barrels and barrels of cans would get us in the gate anymore.