Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away? If the prices covered the real costs, and they were reasonably known and understandable, people buying stuff could make their own decisions about the best tradeoffs to make between all the various things you mention.
Recycling and reusing are great, but there are real costs to both. I've got a bunch of CDs that I don't really want anymore. I'm certainly not ever likely to use them, given Spotify and the like. But I feel bad enough about just throwing them away that I've just held on to them. I fantasize about giving them away to someone but realistically that would be such a pain in the ass that I almost certainly will never bother. [Now I'm motivated to throw them away!] Just the cost of someone driving to where I live and, maybe, take them from me – for free – has both non-zero environmental and economic costs!
Throwing things away is fine. Not accounting for all the costs, to everyone, is the real problem.
Or stop buying certain things. In America, at least, political decisions are not made with the interest of the average citizen in mind. There is a strong corporate interest in getting you to buy stuff as often as possible and that heavily influences government policy. That is not to say that reducing consumption would not have a significant impact on the prosperity of the average citizen.
I'm of the opinion that the effort should focus on making the re-use of materials profitable. Charge people by weight for what they throw away and provide a financial incentive for re-use/re-cycling of everything from food scraps to aluminum cans and you'll find that your trash disappears from the curb long before the garbage truck comes.
A tax like that would put pressure on corporations to package their products in easily reusable forms, with less packaging, or run their own recycle programs for expensive short-lifespan products like iPhones . This would largely offset the costs on consumer.
A significant amount of packaging could be reduced without much consequence on consumption. Especially for food. Grocery stores could use in-store branding/ads in place of flashy box designs. Plus as ecommerce/drones come to dominate, the need for flashy packaging won't be as important as website marketing.
Those risks IMO would be limited to a transitional period while companies evolve their industrial design. The bigger problem is that it requires a big behavioral change for both producers and consumer... it's difficult to make humans change the behaviour they known their whole lives. Consumers will have to make an additional purchasing investment (analyzing the disposal costs and companies would have to invest in industrial design and rethink retail marketing.
I'm optimistic that packaging will be greatly reduced in the near future.
Much of current packaging is for retail presentation and theft prevention. Completely unnecessary for online shopping.
In fact, I just learned about Amazon's Hassle Free Packaging option, which I imagine is motivated by reducing shipping and handling costs. That package should be arriving today. I have the impression the product's original box is used, vs putting it into another, larger box for shipping.
The American diet is transitioning away from processed foods, which uses a lot of packaging. Kids, old and young, don't need every single thing to be a pretty cereal box or single serve container.
If that's Amazon's motivation then they have a lot of work to do. Their shipping practices are enormously wasteful. They will ship small, non-delicate items in huge cardboard boxes, with inflatable padding thrown in for even more waste. Other shippers have the good sense to use plastic bags for things like clothes, which cuts the weight and volume of the waste enormously. My house orders a lot of Amazon and I spend a lot of time each week just dealing with the enormous amount of shipping waste this generates. It's so bad that I am thinking of checking out Costco instead.
I think it would be simple for Amazon to improve this if they actually cared but for them it's easier to toss everything into huge boxes and let the customer deal with the fallout.
Such deposits could be expanded to other products. Car batteries are a big success here, they are almost all recycled and typically involve a small deposit you get back ($5 or so) when recycling.
Hard to recycle materials could just be taxed to provide an incentive to use other materials. The city I live in banned free plastic bags and it has significantly cut down on their use. There's no reason why that couldn't be the standard.
That's terrible advice where I live. Once I touch the thing, I'm responsible for holding on to it and bringing it to the right facility during the two weekends a year they accept such things AND paying the disposal fee.
Wow. Your city's policies suck. My town (in Germany) has several disposal facilities where citizens can drop up to 2 m³ per year of bulk garbage, toxic and electronic waste free of charge.
I become physically ill when someone makes the solution my problem. I can't keep up with all the trash in the world. It's like the world is run by happy idiots. Try looking around then come up with a better solution. By now these are circling our oceans:
No, I am in favor of anti-litter laws. I had interpretted your argument to imply imposing the cost at the time of disposal, but I realize this is not the only way the cost can be imposed. I see your additional comment, but I'm not sure a straight up tax is the best solution either. If the taxes are levied indirectly then there is very little incentive for any parties to change their behavior. Any effect of behavior on the actual tax rate would be slow and dilute. If you levy the tax at the point of sale it is better, because now consumers are incentivized by price to select eco-friendlier goods and manufacturers are incentivized by the same mechanism to produce them. This solution is still lacking however, because should the consumer ultimately decide to dispose of an item, they've already paid the environmental fee, so why go through the effort of disposing it properly? It seems to me a workable approach might be to impose a materials based "environmental tax" at the point of sale but credit it back when the item is brought to an appropriate recycling center, just like a milk bottle deposit.
I think maybe we seem to be disagreeing because I see it as a feature that
> If the taxes are levied indirectly then there is very little incentive for any parties to change their behavior.
I don't care about any particular behavior per se [in the context of this discussion!]. If the costs of cleaning up people throwing plastic away are being met by a tax, why would one care whether plastic continues to be used for new items and people continue to throw it away?
It's possible that the most efficient behavior – in terms of physics – is to make things out of certain materials and then throw them away after some point. It's not obvious that reuse or recycling are always more efficient than simply 'wasting-and-remaking', given all of the other elements of our environments (like bacteria, fungi, ambient energy, etc.).
> If the costs of cleaning up people throwing plastic away are being met by a tax, why would one care whether plastic continues to be used for new items and people continue to throw it away?
Because it's possible that the costs are not entirely monetary. I agree that there is more nuance to this debate, though. In my opinion one-time use objects made of plastic are appropriate in some contexts (medical care, for instance) and less appropriate in others (plastic silverware).
People get into this really nasty habit of thinking law exists in a vacuum free from the existence of human nature. This is sounding a lot like a gun control argument.
Instead, think of this from a goal based perspective. Your goal is to reduce stuff getting thrown in the trash.
Therefore, you want to encourage recycling.
Making recycling expensive harms your goal. You want to encourage people to recycle, not discourage. Don't do it, then.
Trying to force people to recycle doesn't work. It's economically infeasible to track down who threw that oil can in the curbside bin. Negative reinforcement being off the table, use positive reinforcement.
I agree that laws don't exist in a vacuum. What about what I wrote made you think I didn't?
One problem with reframing this in terms of the goal of encouraging recycling is that I don't think that's a worthy goal, in and of itself. I'm pretty sure that some things, like glass, are probably best not recycled.
What I wrote was that, if people decided, e.g. that they really wanted to cleanup all of the waste plastic that wasn't already in landfills, then they should cover that cost. If the costs were really minimal (for whatever reason) that would mean recovering them from specific people or organizations less important. So you're right that it's not always possible, or even desirable, to exactly match costs to those imposing them.
> It's economically infeasible to track down who threw that oil can in the curbside bin.
Sure; but is that because the cost of throwing an oil can in the curbside bin is really small? If the cost of that behavior is itself small, then it can be covered inefficiently, e.g. by taxing the manufacturers of the oil cans or the oil. If the cost tho is large, then maybe individuals shouldn't retain the same latitude they have now to buy oil cans or oil without closer supervision or regulation.
To expand on my last point somewhat, consider plastic items as one example. In the article, the author mentions that some unnamed people [who exactly?] criticize the idea that "the environmental impact of making virgin plastic [are] “minimal,” a conclusion based more on the emissions and energy required to recycle plastic than the fact that the stuff persists in the environment forever.".
Take that last point – plastic "persists in the environment forever" – and let's just assume it's true (for reasonable interpretations of "forever"). What then are the full costs to manage all of the plastic we produce and use? I'm fine with making everyone pay (thru a tax, say) for the costs of cleaning-up (almost) all of the plastic that persists in places we'd rather it not, like the oceans or really any place that's not a landfill. If the tax rate required to cover those costs is really high then that's a nice reliable signal sent to everyone considering buying something that uses plastic that they should reconsider. Some things presumably would still warrant being made out of plastic, regardless of a high tax rate; others could easily be made out of something else.
This is known as a Pigovian environmental tax. It isn't done for the same reason we continue to subsidize the living daylights out of industries like industrial corn farming - while it's likely a good idea in the long run, in the short run it's a fast way of not getting elected for another term.
It's also a really hard thing to do fairly. How do you determine "costs" of specific environmental ills? How much is a pound of waste cardboard worth in tax dollars? What about something entirely non-recyclable, like a designer thermoset plastic?
(I'd love to see it happen though - I just doubt that the political will exists to see it through)
It is done. Ecotaxes & waste disposal fees exist in many countries for various types of products. A common example (at least in Europe) are taxes on plastic bags.
You're right, I should have said "isn't widely done as a full offset". You see watered down versions, but a true Pigovian tax would be priced to offset 100% of the negative externality.
I agree with your first paragraph but not your second. I imagine you've got a pretty strict standard of what would be "fair" but I don't think it's inherently difficult to come up with a technical solution to determining costs or allocating them among different people.
I think you're absolutely right tho that taxes like this are unlikely. They're certainly rare now.
Many communities have thrift stores that take donations. The thrift store then becomes a place of employment for mentally disabled people or others struggling to find work.
You can donate your CDs. Many organizations will pick donations up from your house at no charge, too, so it's barely harder than throwing them in the trash.
Really? At least where I live (NYC), I've heard that lots of places will no longer accept certain items, like books. I'd imagine CDs won't be accepted much longer either.
But, not to (just) be pedantic, there's a real cost in my just searching for an organization to accept my CDs!
If you know of an organization that will accept them then let me know. Otherwise, I don't feel bad about throwing them away. I'm mildly confident some species of bacteria or fungi will digest all of the CDs materials eventually.
I use https://www.gogreendrop.com, and they accept CDs and serve a few different charities. They said they don't support a random NYC zip code I tossed into their site, but I don't know if that's city-wide or I just picked a bad one.
Yeah just donate them to your local library. I did that with all my physical media and they were overjoyed. Other people will checkout your music, movies, etc
Simple: because now you're talking about creating a gigantic government bureaucracy to look at every single product on the market and figure out its disposal cost, and then add disposal taxes to every single product. That'll make it pretty hard, for instance, for some small company to come up with a new product and sell it, because they'll have to get Federal regulators to check it out, which will probably cost a fortune. Or what if some little neighborhood deli decides to make a new special sandwich on Saturdays? Nope, can't do that, because we have to spend $10,000 for Federal regulators to come assess its disposal cost. And it has to be Federal because people routinely take things across state lines before disposing of them, so it's a Federal matter.
Recycling and reusing are great, but there are real costs to both. I've got a bunch of CDs that I don't really want anymore. I'm certainly not ever likely to use them, given Spotify and the like. But I feel bad enough about just throwing them away that I've just held on to them. I fantasize about giving them away to someone but realistically that would be such a pain in the ass that I almost certainly will never bother. [Now I'm motivated to throw them away!] Just the cost of someone driving to where I live and, maybe, take them from me – for free – has both non-zero environmental and economic costs!
Throwing things away is fine. Not accounting for all the costs, to everyone, is the real problem.