This is actually the popular opinion, world wide. It's what we've been doing for decades. And it's terrible.
The really unpopular opinion is "let's generate less trash and reuse everything we can, plus slap a recycling tax on everything".
The really unpopular opinion is "let's generate less trash and reuse everything we can, plus slap a recycling tax on everything".
All the car wrecks combined would be like one sunk ship.
It just will not work, countries are not interested in keeping the planet clean from plastic and from greenhouse gas. It must be on international level.
What, to you, is a "regular tax?"
Payroll taxes? Income taxes? Property taxes? Sales taxes? Carbon taxes? Gas taxes? Cigarette taxes?
All are as dissimilar to recycling taxes as they are to each other.
However, I do agree there should be a lot more effort to recycle this stuff.
Aluminium recycling actually works great, recycled aluminium is 95% less energy expensive and some 75% of aluminium comes from recycling. (1)
Steel could also be recycled like that, I guess ships are a lot more difficult to cut apart and melt down than cars, because they are heavier and larger (citation needed). At any rate, we put a lot of resources and energy into the steel for cars, maybe we should use that steel as much as possible instead of putting more energy into more steel.
Stripping the toxic elements out of a car isn't trivial, especially so in a place as poor as Tonga.