6 ms·

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 co

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?" =)

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?" =)