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Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
by jonstewart 8mo ago
Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.
- vscode-rest 8mo agoThat would be a carbon tax. This is plain overregulation.
- philipallstar 8mo agoJust businesses being intrinsically incentivised to not produce waste by the loss of profit is already a good motivation.
- estimator7292 8mo agoIf that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model. Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying things like "you must stop a machine before putting a person inside it". Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop. We have something like 200 years of labor laws around this point. You should probably read some history and ask yourself why every government on the planet has been compelled to force legislation on business to protect the interests of the people.
- philipallstar 8mo ago> Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop. This is an odd thing to say. Governments will happily shovel the taxes of people's entire working lives into pointless spending. They'll also happily shovel young men to their actual deaths in wars. Now you know this, will you be hyper-cynical about governments, or are you just blaring your bias?
- TheChaplain 8mo agoDon't be surprised if products are sent abroad for destr^Wrecycling. No I am not joking, some german company hid an airtag in a old computer that went to recycling. It ended up somewhere in Thailand, being not very environmentally friendly taken care of.
- alt227 8mo agoRemember when UK council recycling bags were found in rubbish dumps in the Myanmar jungle? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7070709/Plastic-packaging-M-S-Tesco-Essex-council-recycling-sacks-Malaysian-jungle.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7070709/Plastic-pac...
- dgxyz 8mo agoNot just that. I have seen Morrisons supermarket bags in some weird places around the world!
- 8note 8mo agosure, but within an EU context, the company should still get fined as if they destroyed it themselves
- skeptic_ai 8mo agoHow do you know was destroyed when all official records say it’s recycled?
- GreenWatermelon 8mo agoBy investigating said recycling process? I mean, if a company can figure out that vendo X is a shadowy cloth-destruction syndicate, that state can as well, then that vendor can be banned from doing business in the EU or the companies dealing with them can be fined.
- ars 8mo ago> They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should. That just means the business will raise prices.
- schubidubiduba 8mo agoI'll happily pay more if that means less trash, less microplastics and less CO2. The current consumerism is not sustainable in the long run.
- troad 8mo agoAnd when all those unnecessary increases in the cost of living lead to increasing vote share for the far right - eventually maybe even a far right government - what then? How sustainable will that be? Have you actually read the science on microplastics? [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/microplastics-human-body-doubt https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...
- corford 8mo agoWhy is that automatically bad?