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Comment by dopamean | Hacker News Reader

Is it crazy to think that there should be some kind of governmental review process for _new_ products that generate tons of plastic waste? I'm imagining a consumer product version of the FDA. They'd look at something like Keurig and argue that maybe home and office coffee production is solved problem and maybe we don't need this new "innovation."

I understand that people have strong feelings about government in general so maybe some other process?

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There are so many new consumer products that it is hard to see how this would not grind the official economy to a halt due to scaling issues and create a grey/black market of unapproved goods. Drug approvals are rare and expensive.

Where do you draw the line? Is the little old lady at the flea market selling tchotchkes supposed to be subject to this? The small business owner doing imports for an immigrant community? Etc.

Taxes on packaging, similar to the e-waste model to push the external costs back onto the manufacturer and force them to build it into the retail price.

Allow manufacturers and retailers to avoid it by participating in bottle-return-deposit style recycling schemes.

We need to make selling the disposable part of consumables expensive.

On the surface it sounds good. But imagine regulatory capture of this mechanism, now corporate interests could weaponize it to prevent products of competing companies from even being authorized.

I think it should be more of a Department of Growth and Global Scale. Most things are fine to make thousands of, maybe even millions. It's when you start shipping billions of units, or when it becomes part of the social infrastructure, that you need to pay close attention to these externalities and secondary effect. But of course you need to do that before you get to that point, so you build the right tooling and processes and designs to benefit all of civilization and creation.

Some people, when they see a problem, think “I’ll use a new bureaucracy.” Now they have two problems.

There is a government restriction on plastic waste and it's passed onto consumers - it's the cost of garbage disposal.

The secret is that the cost of disposing of plastics into landfills is really, really cheap. Cheaper even than producing them. So the cost is pretty miniscule.

I'm all for taxing externalities and making consumers pay for their environmental damage, but there's not a strong case that plastics properly disposed of have a huge environmental impact.

What about the impact of their manufacture?

Also when you try to price externalities purely by charging for disposal, you get illegal dumping.

I say ban all the plastic. If even 1% of is disposed of improperly, you get a deluge of plastic litter that accumulates in the environment. I've picked up hundreds of bags of this stuff, personally. "Properly disposed of" bothers me, because I've seen far too much of accumulating in ditches, waterways, roadsides, etc, to ever believe that fairly tale. People are trash monkeys and will. not. dispose. of. it. properly.

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