10 ms·

Typical american mindset: Everything is money. Use something, throwaway when don't needed, bury it, contaminate the soil, the seas, it's cheaper. Of course the

Typical american mindset: Everything is money. Use something, throwaway when don't needed, bury it, contaminate the soil, the seas, it's cheaper. Of course they are external cost to recycle, what he doesn't say is that THEY ARE EXTERNAL COST TO NOT RECYCLING. Nature knows that since long long ago, she recycles everything. The Pacific is filled with polymers just because people love to use plastics and don't recycle them, fishes dye (external cost) every day because they confuse it with jellyfish. Jellyfish plague the seas(external cost). Plastics additives are getting to our food chain(external cost). Our water contaminated by flame retardants and biphenols A when you bury it are affecting us (external cost). If you want to make new paper you need to contaminate the rivers (Think about International Paper corp.). Making aluminium from oxide, instead of melting takes an exorbitant quantity of energy(external cost). This article is pure demagogy, if he want to be serious he needs to put numbers over the table.

jacquesm 17y ago
Fishes dye ? You mean they change colour because they ingest polymers ? Or you mean they die ? My money is on the 'expiry' :) Anyway, you make excellent points, and the article is spouting typical industry grade bs. Resources are finite. A guy called 'Eckart Wintzen' promoted a concept he called 'taxing resources removed', which essentially is the opposite of 'value added tax'. His idea was that you should pay taxes on those resources that you remove from the biosphere, and that products made from recycled goods ought to be tax free. I think it was an excellent concept.
- felipe 17y ago
  Eckart Wintzen is my hero since I worked at his company, Origin, back in the 90s. He actually implemented that concept at Origin: We had to track and estimate the footprint of each project, and then the amount was reinvested in environmental projects. Recently I have created a methodology inspired by that experience at Origin: http://www.scribd.com/doc/5507536/Sustainable-Software-Engineering http://www.scribd.com/doc/5507536/Sustainable-Software-Engin... More info about Eckart Wintzen (who passed away recently): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/es_wintzen_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/es_wintzen_pr.html
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    And here: http://extent.nl/ http://extent.nl/ 'Eck's tent' :)
- xcombinator 17y ago
  Sorry for the typo. Fishes die everyday because they eat polymers and can't digest it, their stomachs fill and there is no space for food. It's normal to discover dead sharks and whales with their stomachs filled or nearly filed.
camccann 17y ago
There's an external cost (or benefit) to everything. Fully calculating the impact of a given action on everyone else would be absurdly computationally intractable, particularly for extremely diffuse or probabilistic effects. So, the question to ask must be not "what are the externalities of this action", but "what externalities are significant enough to take into account"? The author of the article is concentrating on obvious costs felt independently by individuals, and ignoring diffuse non-economic benefits (such as... not accumulating huge piles of trash filled with difficult-to-recover resources). He's quite possibly correct anyway that it's a poor trade-off, or that it's at least poorly implemented, but he really isn't making a persuasive case, especially given the lack of any actual non-anecdotal evidence of what the costs and benefits are.

jacquesm 17y ago

Fishes dye ? You mean they change colour because they ingest polymers ? Or you mean they die ? My money is on the 'expiry' :) Anyway, you make excellent points, and the article is spouting typical industry grade bs. Resources are finite. A guy called 'Eckart Wintzen' promoted a concept he called 'taxing resources removed', which essentially is the opposite of 'value added tax'. His idea was that you should pay taxes on those resources that you remove from the biosphere, and that products made from recycled goods ought to be tax free. I think it was an excellent concept.

felipe 17y ago
Eckart Wintzen is my hero since I worked at his company, Origin, back in the 90s. He actually implemented that concept at Origin: We had to track and estimate the footprint of each project, and then the amount was reinvested in environmental projects. Recently I have created a methodology inspired by that experience at Origin: http://www.scribd.com/doc/5507536/Sustainable-Software-Engineering http://www.scribd.com/doc/5507536/Sustainable-Software-Engin... More info about Eckart Wintzen (who passed away recently): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/es_wintzen_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/es_wintzen_pr.html
- jacquesm 17y ago
  And here: http://extent.nl/ http://extent.nl/ 'Eck's tent' :)
xcombinator 17y ago
Sorry for the typo. Fishes die everyday because they eat polymers and can't digest it, their stomachs fill and there is no space for food. It's normal to discover dead sharks and whales with their stomachs filled or nearly filed.

camccann 17y ago

There's an external cost (or benefit) to everything. Fully calculating the impact of a given action on everyone else would be absurdly computationally intractable, particularly for extremely diffuse or probabilistic effects. So, the question to ask must be not "what are the externalities of this action", but "what externalities are significant enough to take into account"? The author of the article is concentrating on obvious costs felt independently by individuals, and ignoring diffuse non-economic benefits (such as... not accumulating huge piles of trash filled with difficult-to-recover resources). He's quite possibly correct anyway that it's a poor trade-off, or that it's at least poorly implemented, but he really isn't making a persuasive case, especially given the lack of any actual non-anecdotal evidence of what the costs and benefits are.