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> If you have to deliver those recyclables to a local business in person But you don’t have to. You can just throw it in the trash or blue lid recycling bin,

• throwaway316943 5y ago
  Trillion dollar question.
• throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >What motivates someone to spend hours scrubbing and personally delivering clean plastic? Image. If you can convince a bunch of dumb yuppies that they will sound like the hippest hipster in the break room when they chat with all their coworkers about what they're up to they will shovel inordinate amounts of money in your direction. And after a good run at that either you sell out and move down market or someone else comes along and develops a 90% as good solution that's accessible to a much broader cross section of the population. Pulling that off is the big question though. Premium consumers are more fickle than normal consumers.
• lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > What motivates someone to spend hours scrubbing and personally delivering clean plastic? Hence why taxes on fossil fuels should be so high that a plastic bottle costs $10 and plastic toys cost $100, so the alternatives are worth it and the plastic is not made in the first place.
  • dahfizz 5y ago
    Yeah, screw poor people. They don't deserve toys anyway.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Poor people and avoiding environmental calamities are separate problems with separate solutions.
      • dahfizz 5y ago
        If your solution for environmental issues is to make everything dramatically more expensive, they are no longer independent problems. What would the solution here be? Raise prices on everything containing plastic, but then give the bottom x% of the population money to offset the increased cost? That is a net effect of zero, with lots of inefficiency in the middle. Increasing prices only works as a way of changing behavior if people feel the effects of the increased prices. You cannot handwave away "poor people will get a separate solution" when your entire proposal is to make people lose money.
        • lotsofpulp 5y ago
          One problem is the environmental effects of using a certain product, which in this situation are fossil fuels. The only solution to the problems caused by fossil fuels, from emissions to microplastics, is to decrease the use of fossil fuels period. In order to decrease the use of something, you can increase the price. Another problem is the income/wealth/opportunity gap between people around the world. This might be solved by transferring income/wealth/opportunity from those that have it to those that don’t. It does not need to be linked directly to taxes on fossil fuels, like most other government expenditures are not linked to specific taxes. This is not a net zero effect with lots of inefficiency. It’s actually the most efficient way I can think of, certainly more than hoping people sort and clean their recycling properly, ignoring the fact that recycling doesn’t even really work. The whole point is to make people feel the effects of increased prices. It will mean fewer plastic toys, and toys in general since they won’t be so cheap, less flying, smaller homes and lots since transportation for longer distances is more expensive. But that is the goal, to reduce the use of fossil fuels. Which all of our modern quality of life revolves around. And why, politically, there will not be a real solution to damage caused by fossil fuels in any relevant timeframe.
          • 5y ago
  • throwaway316943 5y ago
    Do hospitals get a special exception or do we go back to risking infection due to insufficient sterilization?
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Society is free to allocate more plastic to sterilization, it’ll just have to come from somewhere in society’s “fossil fuel” budget. The point is the amount of fossil fuel consumption is causing environmental problems, just not in current society’s decision makers’ lifetimes. The only solution is to bring down the amount of fossil fuels consumed.
  • _rpd 5y ago
    Fossil fuels aren't the only possible feedstock for plastics, just the current cheapest option. If you make fossil fuels more expensive, then people will use ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Interesting! I guess there would also have to be a disincentive to use plastics period.
• Moto7451 5y ago
  Not everyone has that available to them. In my county there is no municipal trash services. It’s all private and the commercial providers make vague references to single stream recycling. I’m skeptical they’re doing a good job of extracting recyclables from waste.
  • linuxftw 5y ago
    They stuff that garbage into empty container ships where it's 'recycled' in impoverished nations in Asia.