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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

Recycling is hard. There is no incentive to reuse plastic when it's less expensive to use virgin material.

The use of Solar Panels have always been more expensive and less convenient than fossil fuel but we've started to make the transition to solar power chiefly because of the energy credits that the government has been giving to encourage the development of alternative energy.

I think we need to start doing the same with plastics and other polluting trash that we output as a society. Plastics will always be less expensive to just dump and not recycle. We need to give industry an alternative. Tax credits will have the benefits of creating new industries and more jobs. Unfortunately we will face the same resistance from the fossil fuel industries that we currently experience but long term it's the right thing to do.

It would be nice to get companies to do it with out government incentives but as we have seen that just does not happen.

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Carbon tax. Make plastic more expensive by accounting for (some of) it’s environmental impact. Adjust price of goods on import to account for countries of origin that don’t tax carbon.

That's good, and addresses the problem that actually needs addressing (carbon emissions). It won't lead to more recycling though; if anything, turning oil into plastic that then gets buried in a landfill is a good thing from a carbon-emissions perspective.

I wonder if, when we finally run out of oil a couple hundred years in the future, all those landfills will turn into gold mines.

i've had this thought as well

yes and for more than just gold

Nah, you can make plastics out of biofuel, only 5% or so of the world's oil goes to plastics, and there's enough oil in the world for the equivalent of thousands of years of plastic production

Might be cheaper to use solar power to reduce CO2 to form ethylene and then go from there.

Where do you think the oil was in the first place?

It will lead to less plastic production in the first place and possibly to more recycling provided recycling if recycling is or can be less carbon intensive than manufacturing new plastic. Also, oil is already sequestered so pumping it out of the ground to turn into plastic to bury in a landfill isn’t helpful.

While I’m all in favor of fixing externalities in capitalism it’s tough to see how to offset this carbon tax without hurting the poor. This is part of why even conservative think tanks (the folks supporting carbon taxes anyway) are coming around to UBI to offset it instead of some awkward carbon tax credit with some means testing bureaucracy that would be gamed.

The best system I’ve seen proposed has proceeds of the carbon tax given as direct distributions to people (each adult gets 1/n the total fund,) like Alaska’s dividend.

Most if not so carbon tax proposals address this already. The most obvious solution is to cut a check to the poorest Americans from the carbon tax revenues. Making for good means testing is hard but plenty of other countries do this successfully so we aren’t inventing this from scratch.

Carbon tax should be done for worldwide so it's really difficult.

A carbon tax was a reasonable idea 20 years ago. Now it would be too little, too late. If the people in favor of a carbon tax had actually been serious and made it happen, then we could have more nuanced discussions now about how to make it work better. As it is, we don't have N more years to argue about what form the carbon tax should take and how to enact it worldwide. Every passing year makes the authoritarian solution more probable and severe.

The best moment to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best moment is right now

In 20 years would we be saying the same about how "it is too late to do Carbon tax now"?

There you have your answer, I don't want to be 60 and needing to deal with still not having carbon taxing which we know is one of the best tools in the toolkit to even begin fixing some of these issues and funding solutions

It's interesting when people advocate for tariffs on China (and sure, other countries, but China is by far the biggest plastic producer) without calling them what they are.

I read somewhere that a reusable bag emits 3000 times more carbon than polythene bag. No one is going to reuse a reusable bag 3000 times, so having carbon tax is going to have opposite effect on the case of plastic.

Where? Sounds improbable if the reusable bag is made of plastic (does it weigh 30 pounds empty?) and implausible if not.

I tried to check the net. I couldn't find exact 3000 number, but the highest number I could find is that cotton bag must be used 7000 times. It varies according to the source though. If I remember correctly I read 3000 number for jute bag.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-08-reuse-bags.html . It has pdf linked of the Danish government study.

I also googled it and found multiple different results with numbers more like 100 times (which is quite easy to achieve in practice). I didn’t immediately find any results in the thousands, but isn’t looking for the highest number going to produce the statistically least likely outlier?

I think fixating on number of reuses to meet equal carbon footprint is fraught with problems and painting an incomplete picture though, this doesn’t really account for things like plastic production & waste toxicity, or the fact that plastic is non-renewable while cotton is renewable.

https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/climate/plastic-paper-sho...

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable

We need to just use fewer plastics because they're practically worthless for recycling.

> There is no incentive to reuse plastic when it's less expensive to use virgin material.

I mean, the environment should be reason enough, but manufacturers don’t care about that

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