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Comment by simgt | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be better to tax all disposable objects in proportion to their impact on the environment or something like that? These single shot bans seem easy to go around.

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In Belgium you already pay a specific 'disposal' fee when you purchase an appliance. This is on top of the regular sales tax of tyically 21%.

But most people don't recycle them, just dump them on a street corner or in a normal waste bin. This is really the problem. So much lithium is wasted and this is very heavy on the environment to extract.

That's not going to get rid of trash, its just going to remove more money from people's wallets as the tax gets passed to them. Might even open up a black market like we see with nyc cigarette taxes. Maybe if the tax went to local street cleanup initiatives or something it might do a sliver of good, but that's just one sort of litter out of the rest.

It would do a lot to reduce the amount of single use plastic packaging.

Sure, the plastic Coke bottle costs 1-2 cents less than the glass one, but the ecological problems it creates are at least an order of magnitude higher than that.

If Coke can either increase their prices by $0.01 or $0.10, and the $0.01 option is preferred by consumers, their choice will be clear.

It always depends to what scale you chose to measure the harm. Environmental plastic pollution? Sure plastic is way worse. Less broken glass on the sidewalk? Now that plastic is saving your kid and your dog a hospital trip. We are also assuming making the glass bottle is more environmentally friendly than making the plastic one.

Throwing plastic bottles on the sidewalk is plain littering. Throwing glass bottles is not just littering. Someone throwing glass bottles around definitely knows what he's doing and should be dealt with accordingly

All disposable items should be made illegal by default

Condoms too? Or do you suggest people wash them for reuse?

I have no answer for that. This does not mean there is no answer (yet). But if we never say "enough!" we can rest assured that nobody will ever innovate beyond what we currently have.

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