15 ms·

This is a classic externality problem. We can berate consumers all day long to be more diligent in their recycling, but all that finger wagging is for show mean

This is a classic externality problem. We can berate consumers all day long to be more diligent in their recycling, but all that finger wagging is for show meant to distract from the real source of the garbage, the manufacturers. Just like the classic "blame the user" mentality, the users were given an impossibly complex system with barely any incentive to get it right. Nothing about the interface is intuitive or discoverable. The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable. They can create disposable and single use items, in thousands of variations, out of materials that create hundreds of years of environmental impact, and none of that consequence comes back to their bottom line. They'll happily point the finger all day long at us stupid users and inept local governments and bad China, as long as it all distracts from their culpability. If we forced all producers of trash to account for its safe reuse, recycling or disposal as part of the cost of doing business, this problem would disappear quickly. Because here's the thing, the bill always comes due. If we let them skip out on it, then we will be the ones who pay.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Some times you need pioneers to show that bringing a reusable cup or riding a bike isn't the same as going back to Dickensian times. You need people onboard to pressure politicians into changing laws.
magduf 8y ago
>If we forced all producers of trash to account for its safe reuse, recycling or disposal as part of the cost of doing business, this problem would disappear quickly. Because here's the thing, the bill always comes due. If we let them skip out on it, then we will be the ones who pay. There's no easy way to do that, as long as we don't have a single planetary government, and as long as we have trade. The producers are in one country, the consumers in other countries, and there's no easy way to implement policies like those you advocate. You'd have to implement insanely complex treaties, which the producer countries aren't going to sign on to. Much easier is for consumer countries to figure out on their own how to deal with the waste effectively. That might require tariffs, but that's something a single county can easily implement. In the end, I see this as a technical problem. It's entirely possible to create mostly-automated plants which can process waste and recycle it. We already have such plants: you can see them on YouTube. We just need to build a lot more of them.
- ak217 8y ago
  > There's no easy way to do that Leading consumer market governments have been using progressive import controls for many decades to do exactly that. It may not be trivial and it may not be free, but this task is no different in principle from how California's CARB forced carmakers worldwide to adopt more stringent NOx emissions standards, or European regulators forced safer food additives to be used worldwide, or the US FDA forced more stringent drug safety standards worldwide. Even private companies can be pretty good at this, when someone has to pay for the damage: the IIHS is private (it was formed because NHTSA was not doing as good of a job as insurance companies wanted) and effectively dictates car safety standards on a global scale.
- mjevans 8y ago
  I am not a trade lawyer - but I think this is logical. If a market imposes the same tax to ANYONE selling in it, irrespective of origin, based on the quality or type of product, then it is not a 'tariff' (an unequal tax based on origin country) but a market tax. Thus a tax based on the waste-handling cost for ineffective packing or non-durable uses of difficult to re-manufacturer resources could be an effective way of pricing the damage to the commons back on to the individual actors at a point where change can occur because of the pressure.
- leoedin 8y ago
  The EU legislates product safety by making the person who made it available within the EU legally responsible. This is always an EU based entity. If you want to sell something which falls under a range of product classifications within the EU, you have to take responsibility for that product's safety. Yes, manufacturing may happen overseas, but generally the product is still sold to the consumer by a locally based entity. Legislating that sellers are always responsible for disposing of products they sell isn't hard - we already do it for electronics with the weee directive.
  - magduf 8y ago
    >Yes, manufacturing may happen overseas, but generally the product is still sold to the consumer by a locally based entity. What about online sales that are shipped from overseas? Legislating against sellers isn't going to work well when the seller is on AliExpress and shipping in a small package from China.
stingraycharles 8y ago
“The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable” Isn’t this rather something that market forces demand, i.e. the consumer choosing the cheapest option? Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with the rest of what you’re saying, I just think that the businesses aren’t as evil as you portray them to be. In the end, the solution is probably government regulation by subsidizing alternatives and/or a complete ban on disposable plastics. But even then, when considering the planet as a whole, the Western countries are hardly the biggest pollutors, so we need some world-wide collaboration on this.
- corey_moncure 8y ago
  >i.e. the consumer choosing the cheapest option This is what he means by "externality". The disposable plastic garbage isn't really the cheapest option. It's just that the real cost of all the garbage isn't priced in at market.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    Remind me again why the 'real cost' of plastic is higher than all the other garbage we put into landfill? I know there is something going on with microplastics or somesuch that I'm not up to date on, but I would have thought that sealing it in a big hole in the ground would be cheap, effective and safe.
    - wutbrodo 8y ago
      I'm not an expert but I'd imagine the fact that it doesn't really biodegrade would be a reasonably big factor.
      - roenxi 8y ago
        Yeah, but ... most things in the earth's crust don't biodegrade. Sandstone doesn't really biodegrade, and we have a lot of sandstone near where I live. What makes plastic worse once it is covered with a layer of soil?
    - 8y ago
qudat 8y ago
Why can't it be both a supply and a demand problem? No actor should be immune to criticism, don't you think?
- dd36 8y ago
  You're right. And the point is only one side is currently being criticized: the consumer. Nothing is being done on the other side except for all out bans. There is an array of solutions. Pricing is a great one IMO. If that single use plastic bottle of Coke is $1.99 instead of $1.49, and that 50c goes into funding clean up of plastic waste, that's a good market signal. A metal can has recycling value so maybe it isn't charged the 50c fee. And therefore we see more cans in use with more consumer-side recycling.
jklinger410 8y ago
This also reminds me, in a way, of the argument I always make about water waste. Yes, it is great to keep your faucet off if you aren't using it. And yes, if enough people keep theirs off, it will make a big impact on water waste. But as an individual, or a neighborhood, you will never waste as much as factory farms, chemical processing, and many other industries. Add to it the fact that these companies produce these products, with these wasteful systems, to maintain profit margins so that they can enrich themselves. If they were making them and breaking even, not paying themselves much. Like if it was a government run industry, and the demand was just so high for this shitty wasteful thing, maybe then you could blame the consumer. But those who take the most profit accept responsibility.
- gm-conspiracy 8y ago
  But the water you and I waste by leaving the sink on, goes back to the water supply. It is not like drywall manufacturing, where the water is tainted and should not be put back into the supply.
  - johnsnowtho 8y ago
    Yes, and I think their point is that the big manufacturers are just going to waste the water you saved, too.
    - robotrout 8y ago
      We still get yellowpages telephone books vomited on our porch to throw away, about twice a year. Three guys in an overloaded car grace us with them, one guy on each side of the street, throwing yellowpages at houses, and one guy driving. All paper recycling does is keep paper prices low enough that these people can afford to print these things and force them on every household in a city. Remind me why I should be recycling a renewable resource again? You end up subsidizing marginal paper using businesses, who enjoy cheaper paper prices because of the efforts of millions of people, all because society thinks tree farmers should be paid less.
dpkonofa 8y ago
This is such a big part of it and it's amazing that they get away with it. Case in point: Blue Apron. Blue Apron positioned itself as one of the more "recycle-friendly" food delivery services to try and fight the stigma against every delivery having bags upon bags of individually wrapped goods by providing recycling services. As a former Blue Apron customer, I loved that I could separate stuff out (hard plastic, soft plastic, paper, etc.) and throw away anything that touched raw meat and just send it back to them in the same cardboard box I received it in. Blue Apron then cancelled their recycling services and now just redirects people to do it themselves because "recycling is hard". Now, the number of people that will actually recycle will drop further and Blue Apron doesn't have to change its operations one iota. I cancelled my subscription as soon as they removed the recycling options because they wanted to put the blame on the end user instead of themselves for producing all that waste in the first place. There is a solution here. Until it's financially incentivized for them to find it, though, we'll be stuck here creating more and more waste.
- dreamcompiler 8y ago
  Blue Apron's cold packs are ridiculous. The goop leaks onto the food, they're a nightmare to dispose of, and they're heavy; probably 75% of the weight of a BA box is the cold packs. If they used dry ice, the boxes would be much lighter weight -- saving on shipping costs -- and they would simply evaporate rather than needing to be trashed.
  - ars 8y ago
    The CO2 would enter the food, and make it taste like a weird kind of seltzer. Is all the food air sealed?
    - bunderbunder 8y ago
      CO2 doesn't really go into anything to any significant degree unless it's under pressure.
      - 8y ago
okreallywtf 8y ago
I feel the same thing about renewable energy and climate change - a top down approach could have such massive impact, but a bottom up approach is so difficult. There are thousands of groups (there are literally a dozen probably coordinating together in my mid sized city alone) all trying to do the same work from the bottom up and on the ground with churches, local governments, individuals etc but it requires so much pressure and buy in from your average citizen to get anything done that way.
dd36 8y ago
Completely agree. In school, we studied the concept of producer responsibility. It's treated as radical even though it neatly fits into seemingly all ideologies. It allows the market to be efficient and it solves the problem of pollution. You need a beat cop though as the incentive to cheat is there.
titzer 8y ago
Clear example of how the market fails the efficiency test: look at the trend in water bottles and aluminum cans getting taller and skinnier. Takes up more visual space on the shelf. Looks bigger and more substantial, but actually has less product inside. Takes more material and energy to produce. But the markup is larger = more profit! (also a PITA because tall skinny things have a tendency to fall over, but who cares). Producers are cynically anti-consumer and anti-efficiency, completely pro-profit.
macintux 8y ago
I've seen this logic applied to trash in the wilderness, and it's maddening. "Don't blame the consumer for leaving trash everywhere, blame the manufacturers for creating non-biodegradable trash." Setting aside that even biodegradable trash is harmful to animals, it's ridiculous to absolve people of basic hygiene requirements. If you can haul it in, you can haul it out.
- pkulak 8y ago
  "Don't leave shit in the forrest" is far easier to understand and enforce, however.
  - macintux 8y ago
    Absolutely
- jonknee 8y ago
  There a orders of magnitude less producers of one time use plastic items than there are consumers of them though, so it's vastly easier to regulate on the production end than the consumption end.
lucisferre 8y ago
> The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable See: Tile.
zjaffee 8y ago
Except it can also be solved consumer side as well, move over to materials that can easily be reused after being put through a dishwasher and charge a deposit on these items, also structure grocery stores to be in a way that is zero or low waste. The problem exists at every step of the chain, where we should primarily focus on reducing and reusing rather than trying to solve the problem of recycling.
king_nothing 8y ago
Yup. Stanford ditched the five, yes, five (5) bins and opted to “sort off-site.” This is probably the best way to go. Also, mining garbage for resources may become profitable with enough automation.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
>"...the bill always comes due..." Yes. But it's __always__ the consumer that pays that bill. Increase in the cost of anything simply gets added to the price. Yes. You might get manufactures to change. But the consumer is still the one who pays.
- ak217 8y ago
  The whole point of the concept of environmental externalities and the tragedy of the commons is that the bill comes due for all of us, or our future generations, because a select few consumers got to exploit the environment, courtesy of the manufacturers. The point of the discussion is that this is fundamentally unfair, and consumers should pay that bill. Furthermore, the cost of the bill is often exaggerated. Yes, retooling the manufacturers' plants to avoid externalizing environmental costs is a large one-time investment that will be passed on to the consumers. But that must be done to stop destroying our environment, and after that initial investment is paid off, the running cost of producing the goods will in almost all cases come back down to what it currently is, so the consumer price will come back down too.
  - dougmwne 8y ago
    Tragedy of the commons is the best argument I've ever heard for why we need government and the rule of law.
- st26 8y ago
  That's fine, but if the consumer pays the real cost up front, people will behave appropriately for whatever that cost is. By hiding the real cost, we distort the market and people make different choices.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Agree. I was simply pointing out that in the end it's the consumer who pays, not the Inc.
WalterBright 8y ago
What you're talking about is called, in economics jargon, "externalities". The solution is to internalize the externalities, and that is efficiently done with a tax. I.e. put a tax on plastic. I'd favor a tax on styrofoam peanuts, for example. Have you ever spilled a bag of them outside? I did once by accident. Spent hours picking them all up one by one as they blew around. Give me crumpled paper padding any day over those damnable infernal peanuts.
simonh 8y ago
It’s not them that will pay the bill though, it’s us, and rightly so. If we want manufacturers to build recyclability into their products, it’s up to us to make the rules to ensure they do so, and pay the increased costs for the goods we buy. There’s no point pretending that only manufacturers are culpable and only they will pay the costs. We’re all in this together.
_bxg1 8y ago
This kind of thing is the biggest case for government regulation. There are just some things that capitalism alone will never incentivize.
codeisawesome 8y ago
This conversation of externalised abstract costs is very closely related to the “true cost” of “fast fashion” (colloquialism for cheap and ephemeral but stylish clothing now available en masse). Those interested, please take some time to watch the documentary “the true cost” by Andrew Morgan. It is available on Netflix. While that movie is mostly about the human cost not being borne by the customers (because of the failure in the global system to impose the cost on manufacturers) - it touched upon the pollution cost as well.
nyxtom 8y ago
It's not impossible, you just have to take the time and effort to do the research. https://zerowastehome.com/tips/ https://zerowastehome.com/tips/
waitButWhy 8y ago
There is a way for consumers to solve the problem themselves, but boycott is a four letter word.
dayn_d 8y ago
You're right. It's more about production than consumption. I think there should be more standardized way of producing waste, in terms of material, shape and size.
GyYZTfWBfQw 8y ago
The incentive should be preserving the environment around you, and you cannot do this by forcing people, you need to educate them instead. "real source of the garbage, the manufacturers": yeah, except they are catering to the needs of the consumers, without consumers, they would go bankrupt, and on top of that, you can just boycott them. It's exactly government regulations and subsidies that cripple the market, and you people's solution is to cripple it even more? Sounds legit. It's almost as if we have been trying that for the past few decades, without success, in fact: it keeps backfiring... but yeah, regulate away!

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

Some times you need pioneers to show that bringing a reusable cup or riding a bike isn't the same as going back to Dickensian times. You need people onboard to pressure politicians into changing laws.

magduf 8y ago

>If we forced all producers of trash to account for its safe reuse, recycling or disposal as part of the cost of doing business, this problem would disappear quickly. Because here's the thing, the bill always comes due. If we let them skip out on it, then we will be the ones who pay. There's no easy way to do that, as long as we don't have a single planetary government, and as long as we have trade. The producers are in one country, the consumers in other countries, and there's no easy way to implement policies like those you advocate. You'd have to implement insanely complex treaties, which the producer countries aren't going to sign on to. Much easier is for consumer countries to figure out on their own how to deal with the waste effectively. That might require tariffs, but that's something a single county can easily implement. In the end, I see this as a technical problem. It's entirely possible to create mostly-automated plants which can process waste and recycle it. We already have such plants: you can see them on YouTube. We just need to build a lot more of them.

ak217 8y ago
> There's no easy way to do that Leading consumer market governments have been using progressive import controls for many decades to do exactly that. It may not be trivial and it may not be free, but this task is no different in principle from how California's CARB forced carmakers worldwide to adopt more stringent NOx emissions standards, or European regulators forced safer food additives to be used worldwide, or the US FDA forced more stringent drug safety standards worldwide. Even private companies can be pretty good at this, when someone has to pay for the damage: the IIHS is private (it was formed because NHTSA was not doing as good of a job as insurance companies wanted) and effectively dictates car safety standards on a global scale.
mjevans 8y ago
I am not a trade lawyer - but I think this is logical. If a market imposes the same tax to ANYONE selling in it, irrespective of origin, based on the quality or type of product, then it is not a 'tariff' (an unequal tax based on origin country) but a market tax. Thus a tax based on the waste-handling cost for ineffective packing or non-durable uses of difficult to re-manufacturer resources could be an effective way of pricing the damage to the commons back on to the individual actors at a point where change can occur because of the pressure.
leoedin 8y ago
The EU legislates product safety by making the person who made it available within the EU legally responsible. This is always an EU based entity. If you want to sell something which falls under a range of product classifications within the EU, you have to take responsibility for that product's safety. Yes, manufacturing may happen overseas, but generally the product is still sold to the consumer by a locally based entity. Legislating that sellers are always responsible for disposing of products they sell isn't hard - we already do it for electronics with the weee directive.
- magduf 8y ago
  >Yes, manufacturing may happen overseas, but generally the product is still sold to the consumer by a locally based entity. What about online sales that are shipped from overseas? Legislating against sellers isn't going to work well when the seller is on AliExpress and shipping in a small package from China.

stingraycharles 8y ago

“The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable” Isn’t this rather something that market forces demand, i.e. the consumer choosing the cheapest option? Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with the rest of what you’re saying, I just think that the businesses aren’t as evil as you portray them to be. In the end, the solution is probably government regulation by subsidizing alternatives and/or a complete ban on disposable plastics. But even then, when considering the planet as a whole, the Western countries are hardly the biggest pollutors, so we need some world-wide collaboration on this.

corey_moncure 8y ago
>i.e. the consumer choosing the cheapest option This is what he means by "externality". The disposable plastic garbage isn't really the cheapest option. It's just that the real cost of all the garbage isn't priced in at market.
- roenxi 8y ago
  Remind me again why the 'real cost' of plastic is higher than all the other garbage we put into landfill? I know there is something going on with microplastics or somesuch that I'm not up to date on, but I would have thought that sealing it in a big hole in the ground would be cheap, effective and safe.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    I'm not an expert but I'd imagine the fact that it doesn't really biodegrade would be a reasonably big factor.
    - roenxi 8y ago
      Yeah, but ... most things in the earth's crust don't biodegrade. Sandstone doesn't really biodegrade, and we have a lot of sandstone near where I live. What makes plastic worse once it is covered with a layer of soil?
  - 8y ago

qudat 8y ago

Why can't it be both a supply and a demand problem? No actor should be immune to criticism, don't you think?

dd36 8y ago
You're right. And the point is only one side is currently being criticized: the consumer. Nothing is being done on the other side except for all out bans. There is an array of solutions. Pricing is a great one IMO. If that single use plastic bottle of Coke is $1.99 instead of $1.49, and that 50c goes into funding clean up of plastic waste, that's a good market signal. A metal can has recycling value so maybe it isn't charged the 50c fee. And therefore we see more cans in use with more consumer-side recycling.

jklinger410 8y ago

This also reminds me, in a way, of the argument I always make about water waste. Yes, it is great to keep your faucet off if you aren't using it. And yes, if enough people keep theirs off, it will make a big impact on water waste. But as an individual, or a neighborhood, you will never waste as much as factory farms, chemical processing, and many other industries. Add to it the fact that these companies produce these products, with these wasteful systems, to maintain profit margins so that they can enrich themselves. If they were making them and breaking even, not paying themselves much. Like if it was a government run industry, and the demand was just so high for this shitty wasteful thing, maybe then you could blame the consumer. But those who take the most profit accept responsibility.

gm-conspiracy 8y ago
But the water you and I waste by leaving the sink on, goes back to the water supply. It is not like drywall manufacturing, where the water is tainted and should not be put back into the supply.
- johnsnowtho 8y ago
  Yes, and I think their point is that the big manufacturers are just going to waste the water you saved, too.
  - robotrout 8y ago
    We still get yellowpages telephone books vomited on our porch to throw away, about twice a year. Three guys in an overloaded car grace us with them, one guy on each side of the street, throwing yellowpages at houses, and one guy driving. All paper recycling does is keep paper prices low enough that these people can afford to print these things and force them on every household in a city. Remind me why I should be recycling a renewable resource again? You end up subsidizing marginal paper using businesses, who enjoy cheaper paper prices because of the efforts of millions of people, all because society thinks tree farmers should be paid less.

dpkonofa 8y ago

This is such a big part of it and it's amazing that they get away with it. Case in point: Blue Apron. Blue Apron positioned itself as one of the more "recycle-friendly" food delivery services to try and fight the stigma against every delivery having bags upon bags of individually wrapped goods by providing recycling services. As a former Blue Apron customer, I loved that I could separate stuff out (hard plastic, soft plastic, paper, etc.) and throw away anything that touched raw meat and just send it back to them in the same cardboard box I received it in. Blue Apron then cancelled their recycling services and now just redirects people to do it themselves because "recycling is hard". Now, the number of people that will actually recycle will drop further and Blue Apron doesn't have to change its operations one iota. I cancelled my subscription as soon as they removed the recycling options because they wanted to put the blame on the end user instead of themselves for producing all that waste in the first place. There is a solution here. Until it's financially incentivized for them to find it, though, we'll be stuck here creating more and more waste.

dreamcompiler 8y ago
Blue Apron's cold packs are ridiculous. The goop leaks onto the food, they're a nightmare to dispose of, and they're heavy; probably 75% of the weight of a BA box is the cold packs. If they used dry ice, the boxes would be much lighter weight -- saving on shipping costs -- and they would simply evaporate rather than needing to be trashed.
- ars 8y ago
  The CO2 would enter the food, and make it taste like a weird kind of seltzer. Is all the food air sealed?
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    CO2 doesn't really go into anything to any significant degree unless it's under pressure.
    - 8y ago

okreallywtf 8y ago

I feel the same thing about renewable energy and climate change - a top down approach could have such massive impact, but a bottom up approach is so difficult. There are thousands of groups (there are literally a dozen probably coordinating together in my mid sized city alone) all trying to do the same work from the bottom up and on the ground with churches, local governments, individuals etc but it requires so much pressure and buy in from your average citizen to get anything done that way.

dd36 8y ago

Completely agree. In school, we studied the concept of producer responsibility. It's treated as radical even though it neatly fits into seemingly all ideologies. It allows the market to be efficient and it solves the problem of pollution. You need a beat cop though as the incentive to cheat is there.

titzer 8y ago

Clear example of how the market fails the efficiency test: look at the trend in water bottles and aluminum cans getting taller and skinnier. Takes up more visual space on the shelf. Looks bigger and more substantial, but actually has less product inside. Takes more material and energy to produce. But the markup is larger = more profit! (also a PITA because tall skinny things have a tendency to fall over, but who cares). Producers are cynically anti-consumer and anti-efficiency, completely pro-profit.

macintux 8y ago

I've seen this logic applied to trash in the wilderness, and it's maddening. "Don't blame the consumer for leaving trash everywhere, blame the manufacturers for creating non-biodegradable trash." Setting aside that even biodegradable trash is harmful to animals, it's ridiculous to absolve people of basic hygiene requirements. If you can haul it in, you can haul it out.

pkulak 8y ago
"Don't leave shit in the forrest" is far easier to understand and enforce, however.
- macintux 8y ago
  Absolutely
jonknee 8y ago
There a orders of magnitude less producers of one time use plastic items than there are consumers of them though, so it's vastly easier to regulate on the production end than the consumption end.

lucisferre 8y ago

> The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable See: Tile.

zjaffee 8y ago

Except it can also be solved consumer side as well, move over to materials that can easily be reused after being put through a dishwasher and charge a deposit on these items, also structure grocery stores to be in a way that is zero or low waste. The problem exists at every step of the chain, where we should primarily focus on reducing and reusing rather than trying to solve the problem of recycling.

king_nothing 8y ago

Yup. Stanford ditched the five, yes, five (5) bins and opted to “sort off-site.” This is probably the best way to go. Also, mining garbage for resources may become profitable with enough automation.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

>"...the bill always comes due..." Yes. But it's __always__ the consumer that pays that bill. Increase in the cost of anything simply gets added to the price. Yes. You might get manufactures to change. But the consumer is still the one who pays.

ak217 8y ago
The whole point of the concept of environmental externalities and the tragedy of the commons is that the bill comes due for all of us, or our future generations, because a select few consumers got to exploit the environment, courtesy of the manufacturers. The point of the discussion is that this is fundamentally unfair, and consumers should pay that bill. Furthermore, the cost of the bill is often exaggerated. Yes, retooling the manufacturers' plants to avoid externalizing environmental costs is a large one-time investment that will be passed on to the consumers. But that must be done to stop destroying our environment, and after that initial investment is paid off, the running cost of producing the goods will in almost all cases come back down to what it currently is, so the consumer price will come back down too.
- dougmwne 8y ago
  Tragedy of the commons is the best argument I've ever heard for why we need government and the rule of law.
st26 8y ago
That's fine, but if the consumer pays the real cost up front, people will behave appropriately for whatever that cost is. By hiding the real cost, we distort the market and people make different choices.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Agree. I was simply pointing out that in the end it's the consumer who pays, not the Inc.

WalterBright 8y ago

What you're talking about is called, in economics jargon, "externalities". The solution is to internalize the externalities, and that is efficiently done with a tax. I.e. put a tax on plastic. I'd favor a tax on styrofoam peanuts, for example. Have you ever spilled a bag of them outside? I did once by accident. Spent hours picking them all up one by one as they blew around. Give me crumpled paper padding any day over those damnable infernal peanuts.

simonh 8y ago

It’s not them that will pay the bill though, it’s us, and rightly so. If we want manufacturers to build recyclability into their products, it’s up to us to make the rules to ensure they do so, and pay the increased costs for the goods we buy. There’s no point pretending that only manufacturers are culpable and only they will pay the costs. We’re all in this together.

_bxg1 8y ago

This kind of thing is the biggest case for government regulation. There are just some things that capitalism alone will never incentivize.

codeisawesome 8y ago

This conversation of externalised abstract costs is very closely related to the “true cost” of “fast fashion” (colloquialism for cheap and ephemeral but stylish clothing now available en masse). Those interested, please take some time to watch the documentary “the true cost” by Andrew Morgan. It is available on Netflix. While that movie is mostly about the human cost not being borne by the customers (because of the failure in the global system to impose the cost on manufacturers) - it touched upon the pollution cost as well.

nyxtom 8y ago

It's not impossible, you just have to take the time and effort to do the research. https://zerowastehome.com/tips/ https://zerowastehome.com/tips/

waitButWhy 8y ago

There is a way for consumers to solve the problem themselves, but boycott is a four letter word.

dayn_d 8y ago

You're right. It's more about production than consumption. I think there should be more standardized way of producing waste, in terms of material, shape and size.

GyYZTfWBfQw 8y ago

The incentive should be preserving the environment around you, and you cannot do this by forcing people, you need to educate them instead. "real source of the garbage, the manufacturers": yeah, except they are catering to the needs of the consumers, without consumers, they would go bankrupt, and on top of that, you can just boycott them. It's exactly government regulations and subsidies that cripple the market, and you people's solution is to cripple it even more? Sounds legit. It's almost as if we have been trying that for the past few decades, without success, in fact: it keeps backfiring... but yeah, regulate away!