5 ms·

You would have to make it punitively expensive for that to sway me. I pay $10 for a giant bottle of shampoo from Costco, if it suddenly became $10 + $5 plastic

by wincy 9y ago

You would have to make it punitively expensive for that to sway me. I pay $10 for a giant bottle of shampoo from Costco, if it suddenly became $10 + $5 plastic bottle tax I'd probably still just pay the $15 rather than refill the bottle.

opportune 9y ago
I'd wager the same would not be true if that $5 saved after income tax represented 30 minutes or more of work on the job. Sure you might not refill the bottle but empty reusable bottle sowed become more common/affordable everywhere, and plenty of poorer people would definitely recycle. You're just a single person, if you're talking about policy you need to look at the total impact
mattmanser 9y ago
The evidence is overwhelmingly against you[1], given how the plastic bag tax in Ireland and now the UK has shown it does significantly increase reuse, even for nominal amounts like a 5p charge per bag. You might not want to save money, but most consumers do. You're falling into the trap of "everyone is exactly like me", where you're in fact the exception, not the norm. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-plastic-bag-usage-drops-85-per-cent-since-5p-charged-introduced https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-...
- esrauch 9y ago
  I think bags are quite different: the hassle of reusable bags is really low, they weigh almost nothing, and they have other real advantages over the plastic bags (they don't break). Many US states have bottle deposits for a similar "nominal" amount per bottle and the majority of people don't do it: when I was a broke college student some friends and I did it for a little while but the math really didn't work out even then.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Bottle deposits are very effective. Aluminum soda cans have a 60% recycling rate vs 30% for most other materials.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    My Aunt & Uncle and in Holland did it all the time and as far as I could tell everyone did it (I'm from UK, we don't have a scheme like that). In this article after a very quick google they report a 90% return rate in Holland (I'm not going to spend time digging into where the 90% comes from): http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69 http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69 So it might be a cultural thing or it may be the deposit figure is too low. As far as I remember in Holland it was 10 cents when I was a kid in the 90s, which would be about a dime per bottle.
    - esrauch 9y ago
      It certainly is cultural: in Switzerland the rate of recycling is extremely high without and deposit. To clarify, in my experience what happens in the US is most people recycle bottles at curbside pickup, rather than drive somewhere to get 5 cents per can. In cities homeless tend to go around and collect all of the cans from the curb and redeem them.
      - s3nnyy 9y ago
        This is not only cultural and has nothing to do with the Swiss being more ethical or better people. As always, in Switzerland the system is very smart: The main reason for the high recycling rate in Switzerland is that a 35 liter trash bag costs around 80 cents. The cost for the garbagemen etc. is included in the purchase price of the trash-bag. (Also, the trash-bag is of high-quality and never rips, so garbagemen who get a >4000 CHF monthly salary, almost never waste time picking up trash from ripped trash-bags.) This is unbelievably smart because this nudges people recycle everything: Paper, carton, glas, metal, and plastic bottles are all thrown away in extra containers that are distributed conveniently within the neighbourhoods. People really fill the expensive, high-quality trash-bags mostly with non-recyclable stuff. If you put in recyclable stuff there is no punishment or anything, you just have to buy more bags, which hurts your pocket. Compare that to Germany where they rolled out a machinary of expensive plastic-bottle-bar-code reading robots in each and every supermarket that had to be engineered, maintained and protected against tampering/hacking/fraud with false bottles (from Eastern Europe).
kaybe 9y ago
Where there is a bottle tax poor people collecting and returning the bottles soon emerge. As long as you leave it somewhere accessible, someone will come and return it, especially for $5.
Scoundreller 9y ago
The giant bottles require less packaging material per unit of volume, so you’re already making a better choice.

by wincy 9y ago

opportune 9y ago

I'd wager the same would not be true if that $5 saved after income tax represented 30 minutes or more of work on the job. Sure you might not refill the bottle but empty reusable bottle sowed become more common/affordable everywhere, and plenty of poorer people would definitely recycle. You're just a single person, if you're talking about policy you need to look at the total impact

mattmanser 9y ago

The evidence is overwhelmingly against you[1], given how the plastic bag tax in Ireland and now the UK has shown it does significantly increase reuse, even for nominal amounts like a 5p charge per bag. You might not want to save money, but most consumers do. You're falling into the trap of "everyone is exactly like me", where you're in fact the exception, not the norm. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-plastic-bag-usage-drops-85-per-cent-since-5p-charged-introduced https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-...

esrauch 9y ago
I think bags are quite different: the hassle of reusable bags is really low, they weigh almost nothing, and they have other real advantages over the plastic bags (they don't break). Many US states have bottle deposits for a similar "nominal" amount per bottle and the majority of people don't do it: when I was a broke college student some friends and I did it for a little while but the math really didn't work out even then.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Bottle deposits are very effective. Aluminum soda cans have a 60% recycling rate vs 30% for most other materials.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  My Aunt & Uncle and in Holland did it all the time and as far as I could tell everyone did it (I'm from UK, we don't have a scheme like that). In this article after a very quick google they report a 90% return rate in Holland (I'm not going to spend time digging into where the 90% comes from): http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69 http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69 So it might be a cultural thing or it may be the deposit figure is too low. As far as I remember in Holland it was 10 cents when I was a kid in the 90s, which would be about a dime per bottle.
  - esrauch 9y ago
    It certainly is cultural: in Switzerland the rate of recycling is extremely high without and deposit. To clarify, in my experience what happens in the US is most people recycle bottles at curbside pickup, rather than drive somewhere to get 5 cents per can. In cities homeless tend to go around and collect all of the cans from the curb and redeem them.
    - s3nnyy 9y ago
      This is not only cultural and has nothing to do with the Swiss being more ethical or better people. As always, in Switzerland the system is very smart: The main reason for the high recycling rate in Switzerland is that a 35 liter trash bag costs around 80 cents. The cost for the garbagemen etc. is included in the purchase price of the trash-bag. (Also, the trash-bag is of high-quality and never rips, so garbagemen who get a >4000 CHF monthly salary, almost never waste time picking up trash from ripped trash-bags.) This is unbelievably smart because this nudges people recycle everything: Paper, carton, glas, metal, and plastic bottles are all thrown away in extra containers that are distributed conveniently within the neighbourhoods. People really fill the expensive, high-quality trash-bags mostly with non-recyclable stuff. If you put in recyclable stuff there is no punishment or anything, you just have to buy more bags, which hurts your pocket. Compare that to Germany where they rolled out a machinary of expensive plastic-bottle-bar-code reading robots in each and every supermarket that had to be engineered, maintained and protected against tampering/hacking/fraud with false bottles (from Eastern Europe).

kaybe 9y ago

Where there is a bottle tax poor people collecting and returning the bottles soon emerge. As long as you leave it somewhere accessible, someone will come and return it, especially for $5.

Scoundreller 9y ago

The giant bottles require less packaging material per unit of volume, so you’re already making a better choice.