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I am willing to pay for the cost of glass bottles if they are recycled. Having to melt down a bottle to form it again is an ideal recycling situation. The cus

I am willing to pay for the cost of glass bottles if they are recycled. Having to melt down a bottle to form it again is an ideal recycling situation. The customer returned glass that is already sorted and likely the same type of glass. Aluminum is another great recycleable material. Both glass and aluminum are eroded rather quickly in marine environments. Back to whence they came. Plastic just floats around a very long time.

vidarh 6y ago
I'd agree with that, and it was a very heated debate but the change happened before plastic contamination was as heated a topic as it is now (~30 years or so ago) and what won out was the energy argument. The way recycling of bottles happens in Norway is actually quite interesting and would be very easily adjustable. Basically there's a tax on all drinks containers, but you can "buy yourself free" from the tax by demonstrating collection rates, and the tax is higher than the cost of recovering bottles for recycling so in practice most distributors and retailers are part of a collective recycling scheme that requires all of them to accept bottles for recycling. It stands out to me as a great model for relatively non-invasive government regulation, in that it's setting a cost to account for an externality, provides a relatively cheap option to mitigate it, but if another option works better for you, you can choose it. If you don't want to participate, you pay and other people get the tax deduction when people return your bottles elsewhere anyway. All that'd really be needed would be to adjust the initial tax rate to properly depend on the relative environmental cost of failing to collect different types of products.
- meristohm 6y ago
  That sounds great; I’ll add it to my list of actions to lobby my elected officials for. I regularly pick up trash while walking around the neighborhood, in part under the impression that trash invites more trash. Much of the volume is cans and bottles, and more people might change their habits for the economics regardless of concern over land, water, air, and life.

vidarh 6y ago

I'd agree with that, and it was a very heated debate but the change happened before plastic contamination was as heated a topic as it is now (~30 years or so ago) and what won out was the energy argument. The way recycling of bottles happens in Norway is actually quite interesting and would be very easily adjustable. Basically there's a tax on all drinks containers, but you can "buy yourself free" from the tax by demonstrating collection rates, and the tax is higher than the cost of recovering bottles for recycling so in practice most distributors and retailers are part of a collective recycling scheme that requires all of them to accept bottles for recycling. It stands out to me as a great model for relatively non-invasive government regulation, in that it's setting a cost to account for an externality, provides a relatively cheap option to mitigate it, but if another option works better for you, you can choose it. If you don't want to participate, you pay and other people get the tax deduction when people return your bottles elsewhere anyway. All that'd really be needed would be to adjust the initial tax rate to properly depend on the relative environmental cost of failing to collect different types of products.

meristohm 6y ago
That sounds great; I’ll add it to my list of actions to lobby my elected officials for. I regularly pick up trash while walking around the neighborhood, in part under the impression that trash invites more trash. Much of the volume is cans and bottles, and more people might change their habits for the economics regardless of concern over land, water, air, and life.