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Don't you think it takes a lot of chemicals to turn a piece of wood into crisp white paper? Hint: It does.
by werdnapk 8y ago
Don't you think it takes a lot of chemicals to turn a piece of wood into crisp white paper? Hint: It does.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoThen don't subsidize recycling and let the market sort out which is cheaper.
- londons_explore 8y agoSome costs of making new stuff aren't reflected in the market price. For example the CO2 cost of refining, or the pollution cost of the factory that makes it. Rather than tax CO2 or pollution, we instead prefer to subsidize recycling. Why? Dunno.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoRecycling has the same sort of costs. In the past year, I've been harmed more by the noise of the recycling truck than the total harm of pollution of manufacturing new materials I could have recycled.
- jeffbax 8y agoI'm not sure its that simple, presumably part of the subsidy is that we want less physical mass/waste going into landfill so there's an argument to making recycling artificially cheap vs. making new stuff. While I am hopeful that at some point the market will come up with solutions to recycle material from landfill, I think plastic and carbon taxes still would have a place today (doing something about fishing nets would sure go a long way though…) specifically to help reduce the material burden (or nudge drinks to go back to more aluminum cans)
- SamReidHughes 8y agoIt isn't intrinsically good to reduce the physical mass of landfill. Recycling is useful if it reduces the cost of manufacturing stuff plus the cost of putting trash in landfill. "Cost" means the amount of human work, minus externalities.