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Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

We don't bake cost of proper disposal into materials, that is why plastic is so cheap.

The Chinese manufacture the stuff like crazy and ships it all of SEA. Rural communities dump it into their rivers and all of that washes out into the ocean which ends up EVERYWHERE.

Plastic, and oil in general, has been a global ecologic CATASTROPHE.

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Cost of disposal for plastic is very small. You can get it into a well-made landfill for a couple pennies per pound in the US. Charging manufacturers an extra little fraction of a penny for an item isn't a bad idea but it wouldn't affect much. What matters is government desire to handle trash properly.

If you factor in the cost of any government managed trash cleanup, it might. Basically require producers to cover all of the costs required to get the trash disposed of properly. Filtering micro-plastics out of the ocean? Add it to the plastic tax. Health costs from birth defects caused by certain plastic exposure? Add it to the tax for those plastics.

I think the market works amazingly as long as there's government to line the incentives up right.

I think disposing properly would mostly be a few more public trash cans and a ban on exporting plastic and trash to get fake-recycled. Which would not cost very much.

The USA is not the problem, it is SEA. Most of our trash ends up in landfills, which is much preferable to the ocean.

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