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“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

“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?
  - dougmwne 8y ago
    One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch A life cycle analysis might hypothetically conclude that landfills are a perfectly sustainable solution to plastic. Unfortunately a lot of this stuff makes it into the ocean instead where it will not biodegrade and will interfere with fisheries and ecosystems. Properly structured economic incentives and laws could solve this problem, as they have solved many problems in the past.
    - greedo 8y ago
      How much waste is making it from a landfill to the GPGP? I'd bet about 0% in the West. Studies have shown that most of the waste in the GPGP is from rivers in Asia. In my town, it'd be cheaper/better for the environment to landfill all the waste instead of sending it overseas to be "recycled." Our city recently prohibited placing cardboard in the trash. Something I would have thought is easily broken down...
      - st26 8y ago
        Cardboard is one of the most valuable recyclables. Additionally, landfills are expensive to build and run so some municipalities are pushing recycling, composting, etc as a cost saving measure. Less trash into landfill, the longer until we have to build a new one.
      - quanticle 8y ago
        In the anaerobic environment of a landfill paper takes an extremely long time to break down. There have been excavations of landfills where they found 60 year old newspapers that were still readable. There was so little oxygen in the pile, the process of breaking down the starches, cellulose and ink was taking place with inefficient anaerobic processes rather than much more efficient aerobic processes. Long story short, a landfill is not the same as a compost heap. Compost heaps are routinely turned over and disturbed to ensure that oxygen permeates through to the core of the heap. A landfill, on the other hand, is explicitly designed not to do that, in order to contain potentially hazardous materials that may leach out of the waste contained therein.
  - ada1981 8y ago
    Burying garbage in a big hole in the ground is not a sustainable solution.
    - dougmwne 8y ago
      Maybe it is? We can dig some pretty deep holes. It may not be pretty but seems to work.
      - harryVic 8y ago
        It is just environmental debt that the next generation would have to pay.
      - wedn3sday 8y ago
        Im not sure if you correctly understand what the word "sustainable" means. X is sustainable IFF you can keep doing X forever and not have it kill you eventually. "Seems to work" is perhaps a sub-optimal policy objective.
        marcosdumay 8y ago
        There's absolutely nothing that you can do indefinitely and not have it kill you.
        Jarwain 8y ago
        Not having it kill you isn't the best metric, but land is currently a finite resource.
        roenxi 8y ago
        Pretty much every physical object we had started out underground and was mined by human or plant activity, except for the minerals that are synthesised directly from the air. It isn't a hill I'm going to fight on, but 'land is a finite resource' has, to me, always meant arable farmland and prime coastal real estate. There is no actual shortage of land. At best, there might be a shortage of prime away-from-water-table-with-less-permeable-rock-surroundings sites that are ideal for landfill - but I doubt that is true. For example, the deepest mine is about 4km deep, and about half the atmosphere is within 5km of the surface of the earth. Running out of landfill space in that sense is like running out of oxygen. The only limits are transport costs and making sure the landfill is either non-toxic or kept well away from water (which, economically speaking, might be a substantial limit but plastics are clearly quite inert, because we store food in them and they apparently don't degrade). EDIT But the key point here is that these costs aren't externalities. The people paying for them are the consumers who are buying the plastic. If landfill costs go up, municipalities will start to charge more for waste disposal and consumers will favour products with less packaging.
- SilasX 8y ago
  It can still be the cheapest option even after pricing in the externality. A lot of people forget this, because they advocate such Pigovian taxes with the intent of stamping out the good, irrespective of the (edit: net) value it provides. I very rarely see anyone come in with the attitude of: "Hey, burn all the gas you want once we have the appropriate carbon taxes!"
  - Firadeoclus 8y ago
    One problem with environmental degradation is that effects are often non-linear whereas taxes are typically linear. So "do all the X you want" is not the appropriate response if the tax is simply used as a lever to move behaviour in one direction. On the other hand, if the government is selling emission rights then this can model non-linear effects. Then it makes sense to say, "go on, use your rights to the full extent."
    - SilasX 8y ago
      If you won't quantify how bad the damage is and how much you'd need to erase it, and therefore what at what tax rate you'd be fine with someone consuming to their heart's content, then you think the cost is infinite and therefore have no business proposing policy to begin with.
      - Firadeoclus 8y ago
        "Someone consuming to their heart's content" is not bounded. It seems to me you're arguing that just because a tax is a blunt tool it shouldn't be used at all. But tax rate doesn't have to be set in stone, it can be adjusted dynamically in a feedback loop.
        SilasX 8y ago
        No, I'm saying that advocates should be clear about what the precise harms are and that taxes should be used to ameliorate the harms of the taxed activity, and that anyone unable to put such numbers on it is not advocating a serious policy we should listen to.
eropple 8y ago
Businesses also regularly campaign to not have to take into account their externalities, though.
xapata 8y ago
Easiest solution would be a tax on petroleum as it comes out of the ground. That discourages both plastic and greenhouse gas.
- mijamo 8y ago
  Now how high would that tax need to be to so that everyday goods would dump plastic? And what would that mean for other uses of petroleum? Let's say you want a plastic bottle to cost 0.1$ more, so that alternative options are considered, and you tax it on the original petroleum and gas processed, what does that represent for the fuel used in a plane? The problem is that not every use is equal, some are more necessary than others and pricing things by a general tax is not a right solution. Many countries are banning plastic plates and bags for instance, because their benefit is nearly 0 and their cost is super high because many people just throw them away randomly. On the other hand airplane fuel is not easily replacable right now, so it should probably be taxed less (but still taxed enough to encourage other alternatives to develop).
  - Retric 8y ago
    You don't need to pick and chose good vs bad uses. If their are no alternatives then a small price increase is not a big deal. The most effective policy is one applied evenly that let's the market adjust to externalities. So really oil should be taxed directly, then you tax plastics above and beyond that as needed. But, you never want to apply discounts for some specific use.
  - lmm 8y ago
    > Now how high would that tax need to be to so that everyday goods would dump plastic? And what would that mean for other uses of petroleum? Charge what it costs to clean up, and spend the tax on cleaning it up. > The problem is that not every use is equal, some are more necessary than others That's exactly why the price mechanism works - the necessary uses will continue to happen even at a higher price, while the frivolous ones will stop.
- hn0 8y ago
  It would certainly be good for the planet, but since petroleum is an input early in the production chain, that would cause price inflation, resulting in higher costs and lower demand, e.g. 70’s stagflation. Also black markets and resource contention.
emodendroket 8y ago
I don't know what distinction you're really drawing. Polluting production reduces the costs for producers.
- astrodust 8y ago
  It should be more expensive to pollute. The problem is that clean-up costs are not factored into production.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    And who's the biggest lobby for keeping them factored out?
    - astrodust 8y ago
      It rhymes with "choke".
dougmwne 8y ago
I didn't mean to imply that companies are evil, but amoral. Unless it's controlled by a single or small group of owners(who could inject their personal values), a company must be governed by its profit motive. They're like the proverbial paperclip maximizer AIs. Competition will always drive companies to produce their widgets at the lowest possible cost and a great way to reduce costs is to externalize them. They will do this to exactly the extent that we allow them. Limits have already been placed on companies in a million ways to get them to play by our rules. If only our legal codes could be as simple as the three laws of robotics...

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?
- dougmwne 8y ago
  One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch A life cycle analysis might hypothetically conclude that landfills are a perfectly sustainable solution to plastic. Unfortunately a lot of this stuff makes it into the ocean instead where it will not biodegrade and will interfere with fisheries and ecosystems. Properly structured economic incentives and laws could solve this problem, as they have solved many problems in the past.
  - greedo 8y ago
    How much waste is making it from a landfill to the GPGP? I'd bet about 0% in the West. Studies have shown that most of the waste in the GPGP is from rivers in Asia. In my town, it'd be cheaper/better for the environment to landfill all the waste instead of sending it overseas to be "recycled." Our city recently prohibited placing cardboard in the trash. Something I would have thought is easily broken down...
    - st26 8y ago
      Cardboard is one of the most valuable recyclables. Additionally, landfills are expensive to build and run so some municipalities are pushing recycling, composting, etc as a cost saving measure. Less trash into landfill, the longer until we have to build a new one.
    - quanticle 8y ago
      In the anaerobic environment of a landfill paper takes an extremely long time to break down. There have been excavations of landfills where they found 60 year old newspapers that were still readable. There was so little oxygen in the pile, the process of breaking down the starches, cellulose and ink was taking place with inefficient anaerobic processes rather than much more efficient aerobic processes. Long story short, a landfill is not the same as a compost heap. Compost heaps are routinely turned over and disturbed to ensure that oxygen permeates through to the core of the heap. A landfill, on the other hand, is explicitly designed not to do that, in order to contain potentially hazardous materials that may leach out of the waste contained therein.
- ada1981 8y ago
  Burying garbage in a big hole in the ground is not a sustainable solution.
  - dougmwne 8y ago
    Maybe it is? We can dig some pretty deep holes. It may not be pretty but seems to work.
    - harryVic 8y ago
      It is just environmental debt that the next generation would have to pay.
    - wedn3sday 8y ago
      Im not sure if you correctly understand what the word "sustainable" means. X is sustainable IFF you can keep doing X forever and not have it kill you eventually. "Seems to work" is perhaps a sub-optimal policy objective.
      - marcosdumay 8y ago
        There's absolutely nothing that you can do indefinitely and not have it kill you.
        Jarwain 8y ago
        Not having it kill you isn't the best metric, but land is currently a finite resource.
        roenxi 8y ago
        Pretty much every physical object we had started out underground and was mined by human or plant activity, except for the minerals that are synthesised directly from the air. It isn't a hill I'm going to fight on, but 'land is a finite resource' has, to me, always meant arable farmland and prime coastal real estate. There is no actual shortage of land. At best, there might be a shortage of prime away-from-water-table-with-less-permeable-rock-surroundings sites that are ideal for landfill - but I doubt that is true. For example, the deepest mine is about 4km deep, and about half the atmosphere is within 5km of the surface of the earth. Running out of landfill space in that sense is like running out of oxygen. The only limits are transport costs and making sure the landfill is either non-toxic or kept well away from water (which, economically speaking, might be a substantial limit but plastics are clearly quite inert, because we store food in them and they apparently don't degrade). EDIT But the key point here is that these costs aren't externalities. The people paying for them are the consumers who are buying the plastic. If landfill costs go up, municipalities will start to charge more for waste disposal and consumers will favour products with less packaging.
SilasX 8y ago
It can still be the cheapest option even after pricing in the externality. A lot of people forget this, because they advocate such Pigovian taxes with the intent of stamping out the good, irrespective of the (edit: net) value it provides. I very rarely see anyone come in with the attitude of: "Hey, burn all the gas you want once we have the appropriate carbon taxes!"
- Firadeoclus 8y ago
  One problem with environmental degradation is that effects are often non-linear whereas taxes are typically linear. So "do all the X you want" is not the appropriate response if the tax is simply used as a lever to move behaviour in one direction. On the other hand, if the government is selling emission rights then this can model non-linear effects. Then it makes sense to say, "go on, use your rights to the full extent."
  - SilasX 8y ago
    If you won't quantify how bad the damage is and how much you'd need to erase it, and therefore what at what tax rate you'd be fine with someone consuming to their heart's content, then you think the cost is infinite and therefore have no business proposing policy to begin with.
    - Firadeoclus 8y ago
      "Someone consuming to their heart's content" is not bounded. It seems to me you're arguing that just because a tax is a blunt tool it shouldn't be used at all. But tax rate doesn't have to be set in stone, it can be adjusted dynamically in a feedback loop.
      - SilasX 8y ago
        No, I'm saying that advocates should be clear about what the precise harms are and that taxes should be used to ameliorate the harms of the taxed activity, and that anyone unable to put such numbers on it is not advocating a serious policy we should listen to.

eropple 8y ago

Businesses also regularly campaign to not have to take into account their externalities, though.

xapata 8y ago

Easiest solution would be a tax on petroleum as it comes out of the ground. That discourages both plastic and greenhouse gas.

mijamo 8y ago
Now how high would that tax need to be to so that everyday goods would dump plastic? And what would that mean for other uses of petroleum? Let's say you want a plastic bottle to cost 0.1$ more, so that alternative options are considered, and you tax it on the original petroleum and gas processed, what does that represent for the fuel used in a plane? The problem is that not every use is equal, some are more necessary than others and pricing things by a general tax is not a right solution. Many countries are banning plastic plates and bags for instance, because their benefit is nearly 0 and their cost is super high because many people just throw them away randomly. On the other hand airplane fuel is not easily replacable right now, so it should probably be taxed less (but still taxed enough to encourage other alternatives to develop).
- Retric 8y ago
  You don't need to pick and chose good vs bad uses. If their are no alternatives then a small price increase is not a big deal. The most effective policy is one applied evenly that let's the market adjust to externalities. So really oil should be taxed directly, then you tax plastics above and beyond that as needed. But, you never want to apply discounts for some specific use.
- lmm 8y ago
  > Now how high would that tax need to be to so that everyday goods would dump plastic? And what would that mean for other uses of petroleum? Charge what it costs to clean up, and spend the tax on cleaning it up. > The problem is that not every use is equal, some are more necessary than others That's exactly why the price mechanism works - the necessary uses will continue to happen even at a higher price, while the frivolous ones will stop.
hn0 8y ago
It would certainly be good for the planet, but since petroleum is an input early in the production chain, that would cause price inflation, resulting in higher costs and lower demand, e.g. 70’s stagflation. Also black markets and resource contention.

emodendroket 8y ago

I don't know what distinction you're really drawing. Polluting production reduces the costs for producers.

astrodust 8y ago
It should be more expensive to pollute. The problem is that clean-up costs are not factored into production.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  And who's the biggest lobby for keeping them factored out?
  - astrodust 8y ago
    It rhymes with "choke".

dougmwne 8y ago

I didn't mean to imply that companies are evil, but amoral. Unless it's controlled by a single or small group of owners(who could inject their personal values), a company must be governed by its profit motive. They're like the proverbial paperclip maximizer AIs. Competition will always drive companies to produce their widgets at the lowest possible cost and a great way to reduce costs is to externalize them. They will do this to exactly the extent that we allow them. Limits have already been placed on companies in a million ways to get them to play by our rules. If only our legal codes could be as simple as the three laws of robotics...