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Or maybe hold companies accountable for the damage their products do to the environment and stop allowing the blame to be shifted to individual consumers?
by tstrimple 6y ago
Or maybe hold companies accountable for the damage their products do to the environment and stop allowing the blame to be shifted to individual consumers?
- lotsofpulp 6y ago>hold companies accountable for the damage their products do to the environment What does this mean? The environment is damaged because so much plastic is consumed. It then follows that to reduce damage to the environment, less plastic must be consumed. So we have come to the conclusion that we need less plastic to be consumed, the question is how. Obviously no one wants to consume plastic, since plastic is nice and convenient and most importantly, cheap. Therefore, if you make plastic more expensive, people will consume less of it (since they have limited amounts of money). Also known as a tax.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tkzed49 6y agoNearly everything in American grocery stores is packaged in plastic. How do we ensure that the companies producing consumer staples find better solutions for packaging and distribution, rather than just continuing to use plastic and passing the tax on to the consumer?
- triceratops 6y agoIf the tax is high enough, at least one company figure out better packaging solutions to avoid the tax and offer cheaper products. Customers will prefer the cheaper product. Other companies will be forced to follow suit or lose market share.
- glial 6y agoMake the tax so high that the only feasible use of plastic is medical supplies and (very) durable goods.
- mulmen 6y agoAlso, plastic is not one material. Taxes can be based on the re-usability of the plastic in question. So very durable goods could still be made of plastic and not have restrictive taxes. This could make it easier to achieve because we can re-purpose the existing plastic manufacturing industry without having to build up entirely new production techniques.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago>rather than just continuing to use plastic and passing the tax on to the consumer? Keep increasing the tax until the alternative becomes a more affordable option.
- dtwest 6y agoIf wrapping something in plastic makes it so expensive (through taxes) that it causes the end product to lose competitiveness with something not wrapped in plastic, companies will be incentivized to not wrap their product in plastic.
- Fnoord 6y agoWhy not both? There's also a big difference between one time usage of plastic and reusable/reused plastic. For example, used in packaging, its almost all one time usage. However in say a laptop or smartphone, the product gets used for years.
- coding123 6y agoWell you kinda are. Let's say a $4 item that normally is packaged in plastic now is required to cost $4 + $25. I think a lot of companies would quickly migrate packaging.
- zepearl 6y agoThat would be silly - most of the products we create can harm the environment. Probably 95% of what I have at home (plastics, electronics, furniture's paint and glue, chunks of relatively special metal like aluminium, chemicals used to clean anything, etc...) would harm the environment if I would just dump it anywhere without control => if you would want to hold companies acountable for all that stuff then we would be back to the stone age => in my opinion a combined organized disposal by endusers + more taxes on products which are "difficult" to dispose of (difficult to implement? most taxes target "consumption" and not "production") + a general "push" (by media & social) to be aware of problems related to such products are the only option.