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> Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt che
by rapnie 8mo ago
> Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste
Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt cheap to produce, that they have less of an incentive to let it go to waste. When I buy socks they get holes after wearing them 7 times, and then they go in the bin too.
- gwerbin 8mo agoIf you can make a shirt for $1 and sell it for $10, you can throw out literally half of your inventory and still make $5 per shirt.
- randomNumber7 8mo agoIf you throw some plastics into a coal fired power plant it is almost the same as if you would burn oil.
- gwerbin 8mo agoI have a feeling nobody is paying particularly close attention to capturing usable energy from this process
- mfost 8mo agoThere is in France a kind of shared network of hot water used to heat up our homes (well, those that are connected and paying into the system at least). Part of the system works by burning trash and capturing the heat in the process. Supposedly they also work on using renewable energies to do the work. Some people argue that the whole system is going against the objectives of recycling stuff but at least it's better than just burning it to get rid of it.
- FarmerPotato 8mo agoThere are anecdotes about trash incinerators requiring less kerosene to finish the burn, because of the plastic content.
- gwerbin 8mo agoUpdate: I made a silly math mistake. That's $9 profit per shirt. So if you make 100 shirts but only sell 50 and burn the rest, that's $450 profit. You make $4.50 per shirt manufactured. Stated another way: you can total up the manufacturing cost of the shirts you destroyed ($50) and distributed evenly among the ones you sold (50/50=$1 each) and just add that to the cost of each shirt you sell when calculating profit. Same result.
- nkmnz 8mo agoThis would been that more competition would be good for the environment because it would drive down prices and margins, and thus the incentive to overproduce. But this rule actually decreases the competitive pressure and increases margins because market exit barriers = market entry barriers