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Comment by woofcat | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused how this is anything other than "Coca-Cola the worlds most popular beverage maker"

Coca-Cola didn't do anything to put that garbage there, people who consumed their product did.

Coca-Cola privatises the profits from sales and socialises the plastic costs.

Even if people don't litter, there are landfills increasingly filling with plastic not being reused. The solution is quite mundane, a plastic bottle tax to pay for processing it. People litter and makes processing cost more? Increase tax.

They need to figure out ways to reduce this tax burden beyond lobbying. Ie campaign to avoid littering, glass bottles, etc. Currently they wage multi million campaigns against this simple tax all over the world, even in Australia where tax is 10c per bottle.

Glass bottles are arguably worse for the environment.

More drink foundations where you bring your own bottle, and more convenient recycling options (smart bins everywhere that credit you 10c for every bottle you deposit... then raise this to 15c, 25c, etc).

I imagine the 10c doesn't encourage as many people as a +1 public recycling score on one of your social media profiles would.

In Finland almost every single can, and drinks bottle, has a corresponding price printed on it, ranging from €0.10 to €0.25. You can return them at almost any local store and receive cash.

There are hundreds of unemployed/retired/homeless people who scour parks, and the city centers, collecting these discarded containers and recycling them for the money.

The return rate is pretty high, even with the tiny amount of money per-item.

Hey students looking for extra cash do this often too!!

Note that the "homeless" people in Finland are mainly people who refuse to accept support from the social welfare, this is because they prefer to get drunk instead of spending it on food and rent. The social welfare eventually suggests a different system for such people: pay the rent for them and give a special card that can be used for anything except alcohol and cigarette. If the people keep refusing that other option, then they went homeless on their own accord and keep spending the welfare on alcohol and living on the streets. Such people are very rare in Finland in reality however, but they do exist.

There is also one woman [1] who for whatever reason chooses to live homeless with bunch of luggage. She doesn't drink at all, and keeps moving from town to town with all her luggage, by walking.

Here's also a discussion about the Romanian beggars you see in Helsinki streets. [2]

1: https://shl.fi/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/IMG_2935.jpg

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/79mqjs/question_ab...

I heard that too! How I wish that my country will do the same thing.

It's cheaper both economically and energy-efficent to just produce new glass bottles rather than to sort, clean, crush and melt old ones.

Why not clean then reuse the glass bottles (skipping crush, melt and fabricating)? This is what was done up until the 80s.

This is still done in Germany to a fairly large part, be it glass or reusable plastic bottles. An argument I've heard from the company producing one-time-plastic bottles for the Schwarz Group:

- Lots of chemistry and treatment is needed to clean used bottles. - It is logistically more efficient to crush one-time-plastic bottles instead of moving around trucks with plastic bottles or heavy glass bottles.

Logistically more efficient but what about the complete environmental impact? Are they also considering the costs of disposing of this plastic? Aren't trucks driving around empty half the time anyway? Can the grocery truck just haul empties back to the distribution center where they are handed back to the trucks from the manufacturer?

I just started getting glass milk bottles in the store here in Arkansas that I can return for a $2 deposit. Very happy about this and hope it becomes more popular (again, well not sure if the US ever did it).

That doesn’t take into account the economic costs Of a degraded environment or oceans gyres filled with plastic. It ignores the externalities.

Why point the tax specifically at bottles and not other plastics? Does the plastic used in bottles have some special chemical property that makes it more harmful to the environment?

Sure, tax all disposable plastics, or better yet, tax all disposable products, or even better yet tax products based on their durability. The point is use a regulatory mechanism to correct a market failing.

The solution isn’t a tax but a deposit you get back for bringing back the bottles. It worked greatly for Germany and other European countries, but Coca Cola is heavily lobbying against similar laws.

Seems like we need both? A deposit encourages people to return the container responsibly but the product price still needs to accurately reflect the externalities. If the container is easier to reuse or recycle then the tax can be less.

You could just ignore the whole incentive thing and demand more recycling.

Here in denmark we still allow Coca-Cola to externalize the cost, but then we have a public system that collects and recycles/reuses the bottles, Funded by taxes (who cares which ones). In this way the product price still doesn't reflect the true cost, but at least the bottles get recycled.

Well everyone should care which taxes because that drives incentives.

Recycling is not ecologically free. If we are going to keep living on this planet we need to incentivize sustainable practices. Specific tax policies can help make those practices economically feasible.

If your grid is clean and you use a utility tax to fund recycling then you have inflated the cost of renewable energy and subsidized plastic.

How about just bringing it back without a tax? Works pretty good in Switzerland...

Agreed on the deposit. We had that in Oregon and it worked wonders because the homeless would collect discarded bottles and get enough money for dinner off of them.

That's not entirely correct.

The Intercept published this article last year [1] with leaked audios showing how Coca Cola undermines efforts to make things better while blaming the customers. It is a great read with plenty of sources.

Coca Cola might not have put that garbage there themselves, but they have actively fought efforts to make the consumer behave better. That's almost as bad.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas...

For two

- Coke changed from glass bottle to plastic bottle. Or they popularized plastic bottle to put in another way

- They launched campaign to "recycle" bottles. So people focus less on consuming "less" bottles

From Citizen Coke https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28789663-citizen-coke

The "individual responsibility" argument, going back to 1970s anti-littering campaigns and the crying (fake) Indian (fake) TV advert (and before), are corporate gambits to shirk their own obligations:

Annie Leonard, "Moving from Individual Change to Societal Change" (2013) [pdf]

http://www.pfree.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Moving-fro...

I see your point, but ultimately it's down to you to see that your can ends up in the bin. I think these bottlers latch on to that argument because it's intuitive and pretty reasonable

Framing environmental deterioration as the result of poor individual choices—littering, leaving the lights on when we leave a room, failing to car-pool—not only distracts us from identifying and demanding change from the real drivers of environmental decline. It also removes these issues from the political realm to the personal, implying that the solution is in our personal choices rather than in better policies, business practices, and structural context.

-- Annie Leonard

From the article linked above.

I read the article, what I'm saying is that it's a go-to argument for these companies because there's truth to it, and when taken at face-value it's really not that audacious to say, "people ought to recycle the containers they buy".

Is that sentiment exploited by Coca-Cola and others in a way that makes it encompass more than it really does? Of course. But if it was an all-around flimsy argument then it wouldn't be "ol' faithful", they'd just find a different argument to use instead.

Re-read the passage I quote: the tactic reverses culpability, distracts, projects blame, and results in toxic and divisive holier-than-thou purity tests among and against those advocating for change.

At the same time greater effectiveness or the sham appearance of same of recycling or reduction decreases pressures on the packaging industry and those selling goods utilising them, but actually makes the practice more attractive vs. sustainable or less polluting alternatives.

And the message resonates through simplicity and guilt, and advertising budgets. Just because a model is simple and transmits readily does not mean it is correct.

They use plastic bottles instead of alternatives. I'm not saying consumers don't have responsibility, but it starts with coca cola ordering/producing these bottles to package their product.

Then why are they being singled out? Plenty of other companies use plastic just as much in their products.

They have the biggest brand. Brand shaming could lead to change not just them but ripple effect on other plastic using companies.

Because they are the biggest offenders, for three years running. Rather than trying to target the abstract 'beverage industry' as a whole, it's much more pragmatic to just look at the biggest players. Besides, they tend to set trends so there's a little bit of top-down influence as well in being the industry leader.

Are you implying that there’s no causality between producing billions of plastic bottles and said bottles ending up all over the place?

I think when you manufacture plastic bottles at the sort of volume Coca-Cola does and distribute them across the globe indiscriminately, you would have to know that some percentage of your product would not be disposed of responsibly (humans being imperfect creatures and all). You would have to be ok with that outcome, and yet go ahead with manufacturing anyway. I believe that makes them partly responsible.

Good point, I agree the onus is partially upon consumers.

That said, glass bottles are an option.

At least with glass eventually we'd get "beach glass". (I don't think making glass and handling glass and so on that much more environmentally friendly than plastics are.

Please take 10 minutes to educate yourself on this topic.

https://apps.npr.org/plastics-recycling

https://lbre.stanford.edu/pssistanford-recycling/frequently-...

That’s very condescending

No, it isn't.

Please do not use this kind of language when talking to any other humans.

Whats wrong with the laguage?

The smug moral superiority of the "educate yourself" trope is the problem.

I actually found the second link quite informative. I'm quite willing to admit that I was ignorant to the fact that different types of glass are not recyclable (or at least not easily so).

It doesn't help when comments like this are flagged. People need to get over their insecurities.

Or just reuse the bottle

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