Plastics should be taxed.
More generally, I hope more will push for taxes on all things we want to discourage as means of weening off. Oil, coal, plastic, high impact animal products. All of them have huge external costs, none of which are payed by the consumer or producer directly.
My only concern is that we are too far down to rabbit hole with cheap, ubiquitous, damaging materials that if the true cost was reflected in the price no one could afford anything.
The simplest example is just phasing in a 'negative externality tax'. First year is x * .1, second year is x * .2, etc.
I think the trade tariffs should be done the same way so that we don't just shock and awe and everyone can reposition in ways that works for all while also ultimately addressing the various parties issues. I don't understand the step function style introduction of change - it seems like a really clumsy approach.
The majority of this forum will think from a first world perspective.
Remember that per capita consumption of plastic in India is FAR lower than the first world average.
And then remember that no politician in the world can be elected, unless he promises growth - which directly means more consumption of plastic wrapped goods.
We haven't even seen peak plastic.
In only part jest, I think our best hope is a plastic eating bacterium, which will also mean that plastic ceases to be the wonder compound it is.
Political games are all there is.
That's not true. A better world is possible, but not if we restrict ourselves to shortminded solutions like taxes and electoral politics. This is a systemic flaw, you can't work inside of the system to try to solve it.
This surely is the answer - The issue is getting government to take a scientific and 'holistic' stance on legislating.
The issue is the delay between need becoming known, and governmental action (and, said governmental action is often watered down from internal debate and compromise).
One wonders which will mature first - Government or Consumer atttidues & action. If consumer demands are quicker than the state, then Capitalism will solve this problem (people vote with wallets, and purchase items from organisations that identify and offset externalities) If the state is quicker, then government will solve this problem (Identifying externalities and taxing).
Governmental solving of the problem appears preferable. It is an ideal entity for accountability and governance (by definition of course).
The reality is even worse than that: since capitalism has produced an increasingly impoverished proletariat, the cheapest most disposable goods are all that's affordable to much of the general population. We have the capability to make clothing that will last years, but we don't because it's not profitable for large corporations and the labor aristocrscy are the only ones who can afford quality goods.
We need to abolish the consumerist mindset inherent to and required by capitalism in order to save the Earth.
I think consumers would change their buying behavior if they knew the real cost of their purchases.
For that reason I believe there is a big opportunity (and chance to save the planet) for a startup to calculate this real cost in an automated way and influence buying behavior by making the consumers aware of it.
If the above does not sound like a crazy idea let's connect at http://eepurl.com/dEOz3n (I'm using this list to keep your email private)
I have been thinking this way for a long time but was unaware of a formal name for this idea/system. Glad to have a name to put to a concept and signed up for your mailing list.
In general, I do think we can price things, after all, we already do, just poorly (existing taxes). I really do agree that we have a pricing problem but I'm an optimist that worse case, we can calculate mitigation costs and then work backwards from there - not to suggest that is the right/best way to do it - just that it is one simple way to do it.
Based on the original comment of "I hope more will push for taxes on all things we want to discourage", my position is that crypto mining should be charged an additional fee for using huge amounts of electricity and negatively impacting the environment for speculative financing activities. Anyone who's concerned about the environmental impact of single occupancy vehicles or raising cattle should be horrified with the amount of energy consumed in mining crypto.
Given the higher cost of other materials, changing consumer behavior (which is not easy, but it's happening right now, and achievable through further exposure and education) may be the only way to change producers' behavior.
While a tax seems like an easy fix, it may also cause the government to come to rely on income from plastic acting as a deterrent to law-making which discourages the use of plastics.
I don't know how common such a thing is, but in Washington state if a tax is labeled as a "fee", it must be earmarked for a specific purpose. If we put a "plastic fee" on products packaged with single-use plastics, and then mandated the raised funds be used to clean up plastic waste, that could be a good way to avoid that very likely outcome.
That's the point: the higher the tax is, the more attractive the alternatives are.
This is not how it works. To what degree the tax gets "passed on to consumers" is based on relative elasticity of supply and demand in that market, not on the price of the good. You can read about it in absolutely any introductory microeconomics textbook.
Consumers generally have less pricing power than the relatively fewer producers.
Also, in truly commoditized markets where there's a lot of competition, producers aren't making large profits either, a tax increase in the raw materials must eventually be passed on to the consumer, since producers that fail to raise prices will lose money and be forced to exit the market.
So no matter how you slice it, 'not passing on the cost increase' is just not very likely with clothing, it's mostly a question of how long the price adjustment will take since there is some stickiness in consumer preference.
Consumers will buy far more of the now cheaper and more sustainable products and producers who continue using plastic will declare profit warnings and some will become insolvent.
Isn't that's how it's supposed to work?
Governments survived losing income from cigarette taxation thanks to e-cigarettes.
The extra weight of glass over plastic is significant. It's not an easy problem to solve. Hopefully truly compostable plastics will come along to save us, although they themselves emit gases when they decompose, and the additives may have food health risks.
But first, make sure you understand all of the environmental costs of alternatives to be sure you're not forcing people into an environmentally worse choice. Farming is not exactly a clean industry.
A synthetic shirt might have less carbon impact than a cotton shirt, but its plastic waste may be poisoning the oceans.
Or, as a made up example, coconut fiber shirt may have environmentally friendly organic degradable waste and a low direct carbon impact, while the demand for coconut caused millions of acres of native forest to be burnt down and replanted with coconut trees. Or maybe it caused the diversion of rivers for irrigation endangering fish and other ecosystems that relied on the rivers. Or maybe the newly planted trees displace food crops, leading to food shortages.
There are a lot of environmental externalities that are hard to account for, and some may not be known for years.
However, it's _also_ true that "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little."
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you.
Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics.
Think about it. Will you think about it?
Shifting the burden of plastic waste onto consumers is extremely naive and foolish. Consumers have very little power compared to multinationals that profit greatly off of plastic waste.
Plastics should be banned, IMHO. But that can only happen step by step. To reach sustainability, we'll need to reduce plastic consumption by >90%. Taxes won't do that.
Taxes don't work to work to change behavior, or people would have stopped speeding a long time ago, sugary drinks wouldn't sell in Seattle, and people would stop buying coffee in California. They are an unfortunate excuse used by politicians to fool the public into "hey I'm doing something!".
Instead, innovation is needed around providing biodegradable solutions that can outcompete their plastic counterparts. People will naturally switch to something healthier for the environment when it's more convenient and it saves them money. In this light, taxing plastics looks like an act of desperation admitting that "alternatives will never be as good, we have to help them out!" This actually stalls development on the renewables since an artificially inflated market is created.
Finally, this would become a source of revenue for governments that would be hard to eliminate. When environmentally friendly solutions finally came about, we'll literally have people saying "If we ban plastics, how will we pay for schools?"
There is a huge investment opportunity to replace them in the vast majority of areas. We need research, innovation, and investment, not more taxes.
This is absolute nonsense and flies in the face of established economic theory backed up by empirical evidence. I don't understand why there are so many people in this thread pulling assertions out of their ass like this. HackerNews is better than that.
You go to the supermarket without your reusable bags, suddenly you're _paying_ for the bags.
You better believe that disposable plastic bag usage went _way_ down. People don't like to pay for what they're used to getting for free. It makes them unreasonably angry, in fact.
Angry enough to remember to bring their reusable bags, or to buy some on the spot.
We don't need to know absolutely the exact causal link, we just need to know while in this configuration, this trend is happening. Maybe certain things aren't needed for that trend, but like you say, we don't have the capability of much experiementing, we can have a lot of robust debate and make our best educated guesses and try different things and see what happens.
A tax is another kind of price increase and we do know, empirically, how to study changes in supply and demand. You can get good datasets for it and any company can do experiments by changing prices.
Logic is helpful in understanding how to analyze data but you can't get very far without data.
We don't have time to tinker with taxes in an attempt that we'll prevent total environmental collapse. We need radical solutions yesterday. We shouldn't restrict ourselves to thinking inside the economic system we currently have when it's the economic system we currently have that's gotten us here.
You do realize "work" isn't a binary thing?
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18326
> Our evidence suggests that increases in cigarette taxes are associated with small decreases in cigarette consumption and that it will take sizable tax increases, on the order of 100%, to decrease adult smoking by as much as 5%.
The tax was lowered back down.
> People will naturally switch to something healthier for the environment when it's more convenient and it saves them money.
Right, and one way to make the desired thing save consumers money is to apply tax policy.
(I am not taking a position either for or against taxing this specific issue.)