8 ms·

Making the producers responsible for the disposal might be the best way. I don't exactly know how it would be implemented but I'd like to see it for packaging t

Making the producers responsible for the disposal might be the best way. I don't exactly know how it would be implemented but I'd like to see it for packaging too. Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Make them responsible for its disposal. Then they will be incentivised to reduce the amount of packaging that they produce.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Absolutely! It is far too easy to create disposable crap that ends up dumped all over the planet. I get so frustrated seeing garbage all over the place in natural places. I do think its a lot easier to focus on the higher ticket items first.
- hippich 6y ago
  You guys are forgetting another part of the chain, which can make decisions - consumers. If cost of throwing something away increases - may be that will make consumers choose something more reliable and serviceable. As if right now residential trash pickup service probably covers just the labor and machinery to get trash to the landfill
  - mab122 6y ago
    Sure but first there have to be products to choose from.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    They tried that with televisions in California. The result? Televisions are one of the most common forms of road trash now. Often on the way to/ from the dump. As soon as you charge someone to get rid of something, the temptation to just dump it on the side of the road increases.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      At scale this ends up being a public health issue because if you disincentivize getting rid of rotting food people get sick.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Roads, or rivers. In rural areas of Poland, it's still common to find illegal trash dumps in the woods or by the streams; any ditch will do. And there goes everything, from biowaste to furniture and television sets.
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        Yeah. One of the places I ride has a few very conspicuous dumps of obvious construction trash and it is extremely irritating. In this case, it's a bunch of asphalt roofing... very heavy and likely expensive at the dump. Its bad enough I almost think we should just eliminate all dump fees and charge everything upstream. If you charge for disposal at the time of sale, then you don't need to charge at the time of disposal. Then you remove the incentive to dump elsewhere.
        aembleton 6y ago
        And you incentivize the creators of the waste to minimise it.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      More full spectrum surveillance and INSTANT FINE!1!!
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Laws like this are basically doomed at the start because consumers have very little choice in the amount of garbage they produce. It just ends up being an extra cost on consumers while the companies actually producing the trash go unpunished. There are some discretionary purchases like cards, wrapping paper, gift bags, single-use plastic bags that might move the needle a little but the bulk of my trash is packaging for stuff I have no choice but to take on. I can't give it back, I can't bring reusable containers, recycling won't take it.
    - squiggleblaz 6y ago
      > Laws like this are basically doomed at the start because consumers have very little choice in the amount of garbage they produce Yep; and even if it turns out that there are two companies who offer products in the same market place, one with a kilogram of useless packaging and the other without any, it doesn't mean that the packaging is a salient distinction. I can't decide "I want to buy an iPhone without useless packaging" and the choice "Should I buy an iPhone with packaging or a lowend Android phone without packaging" isn't actually a plausible decision.
  - dtech 6y ago
    Charging to dispose of waste is a bad idea. In my country they tried charging for non-separated waste. It just increased the number of illegal dumps and garbage disposed in the wrong container by a massive amount.
  - zepearl 6y ago
    Some notes about how all this is handled in Switzerland: 1- electronics HW (HDD, TV, microSD-card, etc..) recycling costs are already embedded in the cost of any new stuff that is sold (there is a little bit of extra price to be paid when buying new HW, that in turn will cover the costs to recycle the old HW that is probably being replaced or that will be replaced in the future). People dump their old HW to collection centers for free, which is then partially recycled (current technology cannot yet recover all metals etc.. contained in HW). 2- Some specific trash (e.g. PET, metals, etc...) can be brought to recycling collection centers and dumped there for free, which is then recycled. 3- To "motivate" people to produce as less non-recyclable trash as possible and to get rid of recyclable stuff in the right way (points #1 & #2), anything that gets into the non-recyclable trash must be paid for - e.g. we have to pay ~2 USD for a 35-liters trash bag, big objects need a special "sticker" that must be bought (don't remember how much it costs) => normal trash bags and big stuff without sticker don't get collected, so you cannot just leave them on the street. In general, during the last years this put quite some pressure as well on the retailers (meaning the final shops from which you buy stuff): in the past they used e.g. the many small chunks of polystyrene ( https://www.vertapak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/polystyrene-packaging.jpg https://www.vertapak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/polyst... ) to cushion what was in their packages, but now they all almost always use small inflatable bags - in both cases still plastic, but the amount of material is like 1000 times lower. They did it because many people continuously complained a bit to them that on one hand polystyrene wasn't environmental, but as well or especially because they had to use a lot of space in the "special costly trash bag" to throw that stuff away. I admit that I'm not the best recycler (PET+HW+batteries+lightbulbs+clothes always, but rarely stuff like metal and glass and paper), but in the end I think that I'm at least "ok". Switzerland doesn't have a nation-wide law about it, and if I want I can still throw away stuff into the non-recyclable loop, but if I do it then I have to pay for it (by buying the special trash bag or sticker) as I usually do when I throw away cans and bottles mixed with other stuff => freedom, but at a price - that sentence does sound horrible but in this context of recycling it just makes sense, and for me it works absolutely well :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_management_in_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_management_in_Switzerlan...
    - aembleton 6y ago
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    > You guys are forgetting another part of the chain, which can make decisions - consumers. Bad idea. The market is supposed to process information for us. Consumers are just individuals who know what they need and what they want, but not much else. The market (if we are to believe the hype) can process enough information to make selfish actors in aggregate cooperate. So why not let the market solve it? Consumer-responsibility is pure propaganda: in the same way “we” (collectively) drop plastic into the middle of the ocean, “we” (chiefly the corporations and their marketing departments) drop the symbolic responsibility on consumers.
    - hippich 6y ago
      having end-users "compute" is the most distributed form that is available. You just need to provide a necessary input for the computation (cost of disposing what they bought). In fact, I almost finished my response with "so why not let the market solve it?" =)
- ryandrake 6y ago
  The amount of plastic and paper packaging/marketing that you are forced to accept and dispose of when you buy products is getting extreme. I recently bought a micro-sd card, and had to dispose of: 1. the large shipping package, 2. the enormous (in volume and mass) product plastic shell package, 3. the glossy paper marketing insert inside the package, 4. the user’s manual (!), 5. the unwanted microsd-to-sd adapter. Probably 99.5% of the mass shipped to me was trash. Ridiculous that the manufacturer and shipper can just externalize that cost onto me and inevitably the environment. I’d expect they could ship me the bare sd card in a tiny envelope without all that waste if they were incentivized to.
  - tjoff 6y ago
    As a consumer though you could also have bought it in a store or waited until you needed something else as well. I never understood the mindset of buying only a usb-stick or similar online. Yes, the waste is obnoxious, but the consumer isn't always innocent either.
    - cyberbanjo 6y ago
      I wonder how far you have to drive to offset the benefit in waste from shipping
      - tjoff 6y ago
        Well I hope you wouldn't be making a long trip for the sole purpose of buying an sd-card either. Some sort of emergency? Sure, but that is hardly the norm.
      - ryandrake 6y ago
        I figure it is a wash. The shipping package can and does get reused, so I’m really complaining about waste items 2-5. Totally useless.
    - konha 6y ago
      Ordering 2 items from Amazon will almost certainly result in two separate packages being shipped to you. (At least that’s my experience here in Germany - YMMV.)
lostlogin 6y ago
> Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Yes, with a bill for the cost of collection and at some point (after repeated failures?), a fine to motivate a course correction.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > after repeated failures? Failure to do what?
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Failure to address the problems they are causing. Eg near me is a nice park. Every single evening the car park gets a dump of McDonalds and Wendy’s rubbish. Yes, it’s their customers and not them, but if those companies addressed their waste by creating less, making more efficient packaging or finding other ways to improve the situation, they would make way more difference than any customer could.
    - aembleton 6y ago
      That should include allowing drive thrus to stamp the car number plate onto packaging.
      - esyir 6y ago
        Feels like we get closer to big brother every day, only this time it's self-monitoring.
      - curryst 6y ago
        I truly do not understand people who whip trash out the window of their car. It's not even convenient to maneuver around in a car to collect trash from in there. And you have nothing to do while you sit at the gas pump, where there are conspicuously placed trash receptacles... Personally, I think they should drop the fines for littering and change it to being required to clean up litter for some duration, maybe 20 hours. Go see the fruits of your labor, and what it takes to clean up after you and what we put city workers through to clean up.
anoncake 6y ago
More realistically, make them pay for the disposal of as much garbage as they spread.
corty 6y ago
Germany has had this for years. Producers have to pay a recycling fee covering the disposal of the packaging they use. The yellow garbage can for recyclables is paid for by that fee. Also, merchants have to take back and dispose of any packaging they sell or use to ship. Hasn't really helped, amount of packaging is still increasing.
- toper-centage 6y ago
  It's really not something we can control effectively as consumers. My supermarket sells fruits and vegetables mostly pre-packaged. Fees are not enough, we need to make this kind of barely useful plastic containers illegal. Potatoes don't need to come in plastic containers.
  - corty 6y ago
    Yes. The "make producers pay" trope is also a fallacy imho. Packaging cost is just passed through the price to the consumer. Packaging and recycling are quite cheap for most products, so unpackaged goods are barely cheaper (often even more expensive, since enviromentally conscious stuff is "premium"). And unpackaged goods are damaged more often than properly packaged ones, so they'll rot on the shelves to be thrown away in a higher proportion. Consumers like their products nice and undamaged in presentable packaging, so they will subconciously prefer packaged goods. Therefore even with a slight decrease in per-item profits, producers will choose prettier packaging. So with only a slight price increase like paying for recycling, packaging will stay. So to get rid of plastic packaging, we either need to ban it, make it vastly more expensive, far more than the consumer would want to bear, so they'd pick something unpackaged. But that is dangerous, because a cartel of producers could stay with packaging, then it is just another tax the consumer cannot avoid. Or we need to just ban certain kinds of packaging. Also, there are hurdles for the sale of unpackaged goods, e.g. meat: I cannot take my own (reusable) plastic or metal box to the butcher's and have it filled with meat because of hygiene regulations preventing the butcher from handling my box. Supermarkets also are ill-equiped to deal with unpackaged goods in great quantities, dispensers, scales and stuff needs vastly more space. Just imagine the jam-shelf taking up as much space as the produce section, with some sticky floor due to the drippings...
LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
Sounds quite easy to be solved by producers. Just send the trash to third-party country. Mission completed. When there is the news leaking out, producer could blame on the contractor and sue them. A nice model. Isn't it?

ogre_codes 6y ago

> Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Absolutely! It is far too easy to create disposable crap that ends up dumped all over the planet. I get so frustrated seeing garbage all over the place in natural places. I do think its a lot easier to focus on the higher ticket items first.

hippich 6y ago
You guys are forgetting another part of the chain, which can make decisions - consumers. If cost of throwing something away increases - may be that will make consumers choose something more reliable and serviceable. As if right now residential trash pickup service probably covers just the labor and machinery to get trash to the landfill
- mab122 6y ago
  Sure but first there have to be products to choose from.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  They tried that with televisions in California. The result? Televisions are one of the most common forms of road trash now. Often on the way to/ from the dump. As soon as you charge someone to get rid of something, the temptation to just dump it on the side of the road increases.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    At scale this ends up being a public health issue because if you disincentivize getting rid of rotting food people get sick.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Roads, or rivers. In rural areas of Poland, it's still common to find illegal trash dumps in the woods or by the streams; any ditch will do. And there goes everything, from biowaste to furniture and television sets.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      Yeah. One of the places I ride has a few very conspicuous dumps of obvious construction trash and it is extremely irritating. In this case, it's a bunch of asphalt roofing... very heavy and likely expensive at the dump. Its bad enough I almost think we should just eliminate all dump fees and charge everything upstream. If you charge for disposal at the time of sale, then you don't need to charge at the time of disposal. Then you remove the incentive to dump elsewhere.
      - aembleton 6y ago
        And you incentivize the creators of the waste to minimise it.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    More full spectrum surveillance and INSTANT FINE!1!!
- Spivak 6y ago
  Laws like this are basically doomed at the start because consumers have very little choice in the amount of garbage they produce. It just ends up being an extra cost on consumers while the companies actually producing the trash go unpunished. There are some discretionary purchases like cards, wrapping paper, gift bags, single-use plastic bags that might move the needle a little but the bulk of my trash is packaging for stuff I have no choice but to take on. I can't give it back, I can't bring reusable containers, recycling won't take it.
  - squiggleblaz 6y ago
    > Laws like this are basically doomed at the start because consumers have very little choice in the amount of garbage they produce Yep; and even if it turns out that there are two companies who offer products in the same market place, one with a kilogram of useless packaging and the other without any, it doesn't mean that the packaging is a salient distinction. I can't decide "I want to buy an iPhone without useless packaging" and the choice "Should I buy an iPhone with packaging or a lowend Android phone without packaging" isn't actually a plausible decision.
- dtech 6y ago
  Charging to dispose of waste is a bad idea. In my country they tried charging for non-separated waste. It just increased the number of illegal dumps and garbage disposed in the wrong container by a massive amount.
- zepearl 6y ago
  Some notes about how all this is handled in Switzerland: 1- electronics HW (HDD, TV, microSD-card, etc..) recycling costs are already embedded in the cost of any new stuff that is sold (there is a little bit of extra price to be paid when buying new HW, that in turn will cover the costs to recycle the old HW that is probably being replaced or that will be replaced in the future). People dump their old HW to collection centers for free, which is then partially recycled (current technology cannot yet recover all metals etc.. contained in HW). 2- Some specific trash (e.g. PET, metals, etc...) can be brought to recycling collection centers and dumped there for free, which is then recycled. 3- To "motivate" people to produce as less non-recyclable trash as possible and to get rid of recyclable stuff in the right way (points #1 & #2), anything that gets into the non-recyclable trash must be paid for - e.g. we have to pay ~2 USD for a 35-liters trash bag, big objects need a special "sticker" that must be bought (don't remember how much it costs) => normal trash bags and big stuff without sticker don't get collected, so you cannot just leave them on the street. In general, during the last years this put quite some pressure as well on the retailers (meaning the final shops from which you buy stuff): in the past they used e.g. the many small chunks of polystyrene ( https://www.vertapak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/polystyrene-packaging.jpg https://www.vertapak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/polyst... ) to cushion what was in their packages, but now they all almost always use small inflatable bags - in both cases still plastic, but the amount of material is like 1000 times lower. They did it because many people continuously complained a bit to them that on one hand polystyrene wasn't environmental, but as well or especially because they had to use a lot of space in the "special costly trash bag" to throw that stuff away. I admit that I'm not the best recycler (PET+HW+batteries+lightbulbs+clothes always, but rarely stuff like metal and glass and paper), but in the end I think that I'm at least "ok". Switzerland doesn't have a nation-wide law about it, and if I want I can still throw away stuff into the non-recyclable loop, but if I do it then I have to pay for it (by buying the special trash bag or sticker) as I usually do when I throw away cans and bottles mixed with other stuff => freedom, but at a price - that sentence does sound horrible but in this context of recycling it just makes sense, and for me it works absolutely well :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_management_in_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_management_in_Switzerlan...
  - aembleton 6y ago
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  > You guys are forgetting another part of the chain, which can make decisions - consumers. Bad idea. The market is supposed to process information for us. Consumers are just individuals who know what they need and what they want, but not much else. The market (if we are to believe the hype) can process enough information to make selfish actors in aggregate cooperate. So why not let the market solve it? Consumer-responsibility is pure propaganda: in the same way “we” (collectively) drop plastic into the middle of the ocean, “we” (chiefly the corporations and their marketing departments) drop the symbolic responsibility on consumers.
  - hippich 6y ago
    having end-users "compute" is the most distributed form that is available. You just need to provide a necessary input for the computation (cost of disposing what they bought). In fact, I almost finished my response with "so why not let the market solve it?" =)
ryandrake 6y ago
The amount of plastic and paper packaging/marketing that you are forced to accept and dispose of when you buy products is getting extreme. I recently bought a micro-sd card, and had to dispose of: 1. the large shipping package, 2. the enormous (in volume and mass) product plastic shell package, 3. the glossy paper marketing insert inside the package, 4. the user’s manual (!), 5. the unwanted microsd-to-sd adapter. Probably 99.5% of the mass shipped to me was trash. Ridiculous that the manufacturer and shipper can just externalize that cost onto me and inevitably the environment. I’d expect they could ship me the bare sd card in a tiny envelope without all that waste if they were incentivized to.
- tjoff 6y ago
  As a consumer though you could also have bought it in a store or waited until you needed something else as well. I never understood the mindset of buying only a usb-stick or similar online. Yes, the waste is obnoxious, but the consumer isn't always innocent either.
  - cyberbanjo 6y ago
    I wonder how far you have to drive to offset the benefit in waste from shipping
    - tjoff 6y ago
      Well I hope you wouldn't be making a long trip for the sole purpose of buying an sd-card either. Some sort of emergency? Sure, but that is hardly the norm.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      I figure it is a wash. The shipping package can and does get reused, so I’m really complaining about waste items 2-5. Totally useless.
  - konha 6y ago
    Ordering 2 items from Amazon will almost certainly result in two separate packages being shipped to you. (At least that’s my experience here in Germany - YMMV.)

lostlogin 6y ago

> Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Yes, with a bill for the cost of collection and at some point (after repeated failures?), a fine to motivate a course correction.

marcosdumay 6y ago
> after repeated failures? Failure to do what?
- lostlogin 6y ago
  Failure to address the problems they are causing. Eg near me is a nice park. Every single evening the car park gets a dump of McDonalds and Wendy’s rubbish. Yes, it’s their customers and not them, but if those companies addressed their waste by creating less, making more efficient packaging or finding other ways to improve the situation, they would make way more difference than any customer could.
  - aembleton 6y ago
    That should include allowing drive thrus to stamp the car number plate onto packaging.
    - esyir 6y ago
      Feels like we get closer to big brother every day, only this time it's self-monitoring.
    - curryst 6y ago
      I truly do not understand people who whip trash out the window of their car. It's not even convenient to maneuver around in a car to collect trash from in there. And you have nothing to do while you sit at the gas pump, where there are conspicuously placed trash receptacles... Personally, I think they should drop the fines for littering and change it to being required to clean up litter for some duration, maybe 20 hours. Go see the fruits of your labor, and what it takes to clean up after you and what we put city workers through to clean up.

anoncake 6y ago

More realistically, make them pay for the disposal of as much garbage as they spread.

corty 6y ago

Germany has had this for years. Producers have to pay a recycling fee covering the disposal of the packaging they use. The yellow garbage can for recyclables is paid for by that fee. Also, merchants have to take back and dispose of any packaging they sell or use to ship. Hasn't really helped, amount of packaging is still increasing.

toper-centage 6y ago
It's really not something we can control effectively as consumers. My supermarket sells fruits and vegetables mostly pre-packaged. Fees are not enough, we need to make this kind of barely useful plastic containers illegal. Potatoes don't need to come in plastic containers.
- corty 6y ago
  Yes. The "make producers pay" trope is also a fallacy imho. Packaging cost is just passed through the price to the consumer. Packaging and recycling are quite cheap for most products, so unpackaged goods are barely cheaper (often even more expensive, since enviromentally conscious stuff is "premium"). And unpackaged goods are damaged more often than properly packaged ones, so they'll rot on the shelves to be thrown away in a higher proportion. Consumers like their products nice and undamaged in presentable packaging, so they will subconciously prefer packaged goods. Therefore even with a slight decrease in per-item profits, producers will choose prettier packaging. So with only a slight price increase like paying for recycling, packaging will stay. So to get rid of plastic packaging, we either need to ban it, make it vastly more expensive, far more than the consumer would want to bear, so they'd pick something unpackaged. But that is dangerous, because a cartel of producers could stay with packaging, then it is just another tax the consumer cannot avoid. Or we need to just ban certain kinds of packaging. Also, there are hurdles for the sale of unpackaged goods, e.g. meat: I cannot take my own (reusable) plastic or metal box to the butcher's and have it filled with meat because of hygiene regulations preventing the butcher from handling my box. Supermarkets also are ill-equiped to deal with unpackaged goods in great quantities, dispensers, scales and stuff needs vastly more space. Just imagine the jam-shelf taking up as much space as the produce section, with some sticky floor due to the drippings...

LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago

Sounds quite easy to be solved by producers. Just send the trash to third-party country. Mission completed. When there is the news leaking out, producer could blame on the contractor and sue them. A nice model. Isn't it?