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Why stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end
by jaggederest 10mo ago
Why stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly. Trash is an enormous externality. I'm talking about plastic clamshells, container lids, "disposable" storage containers, the lot.
- rvba 10mo agoBecause it has to start somewhere. Also many countries collect disposable plastic.
- Waterluvian 10mo agoTrash piles is one way the actual cost of things is obfuscated and punted to future generations. A lot of people wouldn’t want this because it’s asking for stuff to become more expensive for them.
- Earw0rm 10mo agoIf people had to pay the true cost of their decisions up-front, we'd make a lot of different decisions. That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back, and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds. Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is subject to opinion and bias.
- teiferer 10mo agoYou don't need to get it perfect though. The right incentives get you most of the way. Perfect is the enemy of good.
- pyrolistical 10mo agoGo further. Every product must be returned to manufacturer at end of life. Any items found by garbage program will be collected and returned to manufacturer at cost. All items sold in country must be identifiable for this purpose. Importers are considered the manufacturers and must retrofit products. Then we would be getting closer to capturing the total burden to society.
- irishcoffee 10mo agoThe amount of completely useless plastic garbage that we would be sending back east would be mind-numbing. They don’t have anywhere to put that trash either.
- teiferer 10mo agoSo maybe if you make the cost high enough (which is currently just externalized) then they might start disappearing by not being produced in the first place by lack of demand. People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.
- irishcoffee 10mo ago> People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap. This is an interesting thread to pull on. Why is it so inexpensive for the east to make plastic garbage and sell it to the world?
- pyrolistical 10mo ago1. Plastic is cheap 2. Importers of cheap plastic crap are not on the hook of the eventual disposal. So the cost isn’t seen by the consumer at point of purchase but instead indirectly seen in increased taxes for garbage disposal
- lend000 10mo agoI don't hate the idea. But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost more to get them back for multiple reasons, including products not being as neatly packaged and often going from many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies; you basically make it impossible for small companies to make complicated products. And are we including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit from economies of scale. Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills for different types of enriched materials, and government subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of greater public interest to recycle. I've been working on the software side of the technology needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years, waiting for some hardware advancements.
- hippo22 10mo agoWhy is trash an "enormous externality"? Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.
- throwmeoutplzdo 10mo agoIt should be at a minimum stored safely. How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?
- loeg 10mo agoRegular trash is already stored safely.
- lostlogin 10mo agoThe great pacific garbage patch disagrees.
- loeg 10mo agoAs mentioned in the other thread, ocean plastics have nothing to do with landfill-disposed trash. They're mostly fishing nets waste, and at that, mostly from mismanagement by a handful of poor countries. I'll assume good faith here and that you were simply unaware of the origins of the so-called great garbage patch, but in future discussions I think it would do your arguments some credence not to bring up ocean plastics in response to discussion about landfills.
- schrodinger 10mo agoIt's an externality because the entity that sold it to you doesn't have to pay the consequences of dealing with the trash. OP said "dispose of it properly," which could mean a lot of things, all of which are better than leaving it on a beach.
- loeg 10mo agoTrash disposal (to regulated landfills, not beaches) is enormously inexpensive and increasing the cost of every item through a laborious return program doesn't improve anything.
- hammock 10mo ago> more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly Yeah, we had that. Glass milk bottles and coke bottles and bulk goods sold out of barrels by the lb rather than in plastic bags. But then plastic took off and soon after Big Sugar paid a PR/lobbying firm to run a campaign with a fake Indian crying a single tear and calling every Tom Dick and Harry a “litterbug” and now the pile of garbage is our fault, not the manufacturers.
- tomcam 10mo agoIt was amazing being a kid back then because you could earn some decent coin returning bottles
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- foolfoolz 10mo agothere are still people today who roam neighborhoods collecting bottles and cans
- tombert 10mo agoMy neighborhood recycling occurs on Thursday night, so I take all my empty cans and put them in a clear plastic back and put them next to my trash. I do not think that the garbage people have ever gotten the cans; there is always a homeless person that will walk around and pick up the bag of empties, presumably to redeem them somewhere. I don’t have an issue with it, if they want to do what I am too lazy to do, more power to them.
- teiferer 10mo agoNowadays the homeless or other less-than-living-wage earners do that for us. You can see them everywhere in cities all over north america and europe if you pay attention.
- throw101010 10mo agoSwitzerland has something like this for "eWaste", it's called the ARC [1] (Advance Recycling Contribution). For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it will generate. The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell electronic devices, you don't have to return them to the exact store where it was purchased, as long as they sell similar devices they cannot refuse to take it back (without paying anything more). It works pretty well, even if shop owners/workers aren't always pleasant when you return something. [1] https://www.erecycling.ch/en/privatpersonen/blog/vRB-Vorgezogener-Recyclingbeitrag.html https://www.erecycling.ch/en/privatpersonen/blog/vRB-Vorgezo...
- Domenic_S 10mo agoWe have it in California, just for monitors for some reason, but on Jan 1 a new law covering battery-embedded devices took effect. That new one specifically doesn't tax vapes (???) https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/covered-electronic-waste-recycling-fee/getting-started.htm https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/covered-electronic-waste...
- array_key_first 10mo agoBig tobacco strikes again!
- Espressosaurus 10mo agoProbably originated for disposal of CRTs, due to all that leaded glass.
- consp 10mo agoSame here in the Netherlands. But only for larger appliances. Washing machines for instance. Smaller ones you have to be able to send for free but there are too many exceptions. My internet provider switched out the modems and simply said "it's yours now, for free!" Meaning: we don't want to pay for disposing of our inventory. I send it to their free postage address they use for broken items with a brick, since they are charged per kg.
- lostlogin 10mo agoI’m reading ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan’s Weisman. Last thread like this had someone recommend it (thanks!). Every bit of plastic humans have made still exits, bar a small amount we have burnt. That’s concerning.
- bloppe 10mo agoAll petroleum products come from the fossilized remains of the first trees to evolve lignin, which was tough and durable enough to allow trees to grow taller, but also too tough and durable for any other living things to decompose it. At the time, fallen trees would not rot, and the resulting buildup of wood all over the place caused all sorts of ecological problems. Many of those trees ended up buried deep underground before microbes could evolve the means to eat them, where they became fossilized and turned into coal and petroleum, which we eventually turned into plastic. Now, that plastic is too tough and durable for any modern microbes to decompose it, and it's starting to build up too. It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days. I'm not pro-pollution, but this is far from the first ecological disaster that the global ecosystem can probably adapt to. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_marine_bacteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_marine_...
- defrost 10mo agoYou are boldly and confidently at odds with the usual explanations of the formation of oil: * https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum these other sources all assert that The origin of fossil fuels is the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, particularly planktons and algae.
- aaronblohowiak 10mo agoI think they are conflating Carboniferous Period / white rot slowing _coal_ formation with Oil formation.
- Ericson2314 10mo agoMechanism design for better trash economics is hard for the same reasons that making a good linearly typed programming language is hard. I'm not kidding :)
- jaggederest 10mo agoIt's funny because I'm working on a type theory first toy language as we speak... so you're not wrong, but I'm also foolish enough to be ambitious.
- teiferer 10mo ago"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a next phase where you do more. Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Or they made fun of wind power when it was barely 0.1% of energy production. Why not immediately demand 20 years ago that all single use plastic is banned? Or that only wind and solar are allowed? Because the step is too big, it would not be accepted. You need to take one step at a time. That's even a viable strategy against procrastination. There is this big daunting task. So much to do! Oh my, better scroll a little tiktok first. No, just take a small first step of the task. Very small, no big commitment. Then maybe do some tiktok, but the little first step won't be too much. Result is, you have an immediate sense of accomplishment and actually made progress, maybe even stay hooked with more steps of the ultimately big task.
- bigstrat2003 10mo ago> Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Yeah, because they suck. Uh, pun not intended. Paper straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace, so people resist them as much as they can. If you want to actually make a difference with an environmental effort, you need to make something superior. Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent. People actually like having LED bulbs and seek them out. The same cannot be said, and likely never will be said, of paper straws.
- dyauspitr 10mo agoYes let’s burden any fledging company with the added bureaucracy of having to set up trash collection, disposal and recycling.
- erfgh 10mo agoIt will raise the costs and the prices, people will be unhappy and this will result in far-right populist parties taking over.
- sneak 10mo agoStopping there makes sense because plastic sitting in a landfill isn’t harmful. Lithium batteries require special hazmat procedures.