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Comment by cascom | Hacker News Reader

First of all the people that throw the trash in the river/sea are the polluters.

Second the question is whether their products are disproportionately represented in the sample sets

"The Keep America Beautiful narrow focus on litter, and indeed construction of the modern concept of litter, is seen as an attempt to divert responsibility from industries that manufacture and sell disposable products to the consumer that improperly disposes of the related non-returnable wrappers, filters, and beverage containers.[2]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful

also more entertaining media https://youtu.be/koqNm_TgOZk

The polluters is a chain of people/events not responsibility only of the last participant of the chain; plastic is extraordinarly resilient.

Except that doesn't tell the whole story. You can toss a plastic bottle in a trash bin and still have it end up in the rivers. Animals get into bins all the time. Along with imperfect collection mechanisms -- bin too stuffed? A bottle or two falls out of the garbage truck? Landfill exposed to the elements?

Relying on humans to do the right thing with the bottles is a good intentions solution. And in tech, at least, we don't like good intentions solutions. If relying on good intentions worked, we'd already have solved the problem because people already have good intentions.

Instead, we need to make it impossible to do the wrong thing. How do we make it impossible for plastic bottles to end up in the river? One way is to stop making plastic bottles.

additionally - even with the best intentions (in Germany for example, we have a great deposit based system where you return bottles for recycling / reuse at your local supermarket and get the deposit back) - it turns out that recycling just does not work as it should. DW (1) recently did an expose which showed that significant amounts of plastic that's sent through the recycling process actually ends up in south east asia (many companies are now banning this) - where it ends up getting burned / dumped into the ocean etc.

If we stopped it at the source - and forced these companies to spend a fraction of their massive revenues into innovating around more sustainable alternatives (effectively just pricing in the externality that they are currently getting a free ride on). You'd end up with a much better scenario where consumers can still enjoy the products and don't even have to deal with the cognitive overload of sorting 12 different types of waste.

I think one of the biggest coups that governmentes & corporations have pulled off is to let the burden of environmentally friendliness get shifted to the end consumer. This means that it requires masses of people to first get informed, then get mobilized and then start boycotting or putting pressure on these companies to change something. Pretty wasteful cycle if you ask me, easier to price it in much earlier at the source.

(1) https://www.dw.com/en/dumping-plastic-waste-on-others/av-494...

I'm inclined to agree with you but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303618

Trying to address a problem like this one by placing the responsibility squarely on end consumers seems like a mistake. There are too many of them in too many places and their behavior is harder to regulate.

Placing the cost of disposal or pollution (best that regulators can assess that) upon the producers seems at first glance to create many of the right incentives, such as improving packaging, reducing waste, increasing recycling, more effective disposal, and modifying consumer behavior in the only way that seems to be universally understood: the price of goods.

Are there environmentally better containers than they are using but they are more expensive? Then the brands of course are to blame. And they should be fined, quite brutally. It will rapidly stop.

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