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Oddly, my county (Fairfax Co, VA) stopped collecting glass, but continues to collect plastic. IIRC, the problem was broken glass clogging up the sorting machine

Oddly, my county (Fairfax Co, VA) stopped collecting glass, but continues to collect plastic. IIRC, the problem was broken glass clogging up the sorting machinery. Anyways, I’d prefer we taxed the crap out of single-use packaging to properly account for the waste handling over time.

enragedcacti 4y ago
FWIW Fairfax now has purple bins scattered around for recycling glass, which then gets crushed up and used in place of fill gravel in county projects. It's a pain to drop it all off yourself but at least it is actually getting used. BTW I highly recommend wearing ear protection, it can be really loud dropping the glass into the container. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/glass https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/gl...
unnamed76ri 4y ago
Taxing the crap out of anything to fix a problem means taking money from one group of people, losing 80% to gov bureaucracy, and giving the remaining 20% to someone else. Likely a campaign donor. When will people recognize that government is really really bad at solving problems. How is that war on drugs going anyway?
- rjbwork 4y ago
  Unfortunately, taxes and regulations seem to be the only mechanisms we have to price externalities into economic activity.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  How else would you regulate negative externalities? The goal is to build the externality into the price, which then gives incentive to move to less harmful packaging, etc. Spending any revenue on something useful is a secondary goal here. The war on drugs is a completely different situation.
Bedon292 4y ago
Prince William did the same with Glass. But also only takes 1 and 2 plastic now. My understanding was that there isn't any facility that can economically handle the glass anywhere in the region. So it just wasn't affordable to do anything other than crush it.

enragedcacti 4y ago

FWIW Fairfax now has purple bins scattered around for recycling glass, which then gets crushed up and used in place of fill gravel in county projects. It's a pain to drop it all off yourself but at least it is actually getting used. BTW I highly recommend wearing ear protection, it can be really loud dropping the glass into the container. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/glass https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/gl...

unnamed76ri 4y ago

Taxing the crap out of anything to fix a problem means taking money from one group of people, losing 80% to gov bureaucracy, and giving the remaining 20% to someone else. Likely a campaign donor. When will people recognize that government is really really bad at solving problems. How is that war on drugs going anyway?

rjbwork 4y ago
Unfortunately, taxes and regulations seem to be the only mechanisms we have to price externalities into economic activity.
alistairSH 4y ago
How else would you regulate negative externalities? The goal is to build the externality into the price, which then gives incentive to move to less harmful packaging, etc. Spending any revenue on something useful is a secondary goal here. The war on drugs is a completely different situation.

Bedon292 4y ago

Prince William did the same with Glass. But also only takes 1 and 2 plastic now. My understanding was that there isn't any facility that can economically handle the glass anywhere in the region. So it just wasn't affordable to do anything other than crush it.