I think this makes the same mistake that has always been made with respect to plastic -- it assumes the responsibility of making recycling work should fall to the consumer, when it should really be imposed on the producer. If the responsibility and cost were imposed on the packaging manufacturers to make sure that most of the packaging they produce get recycled, they would be forced to find a solution. They could then respond to this by choosing to move away from plastic altogether, or choosing materials that are easier to recycle, or raising prices and using the proceeds to pay for effective collection efforts and so forth. As it stands, the packagers' incentives are all aligned with plastic packaging -- it is cheaper to produce, cheaper to transport, and more versatile than other materials. As it stands, all of the costs of the waste stream from plastics are borne by consumers and the environment.
agree, there really needs to be strong negative incentives to reduce plastic packaging... we consumers don't have a choice of "apples in plastic" vs "apples in cardboard" its just whatever the supermarket buys is what we get
I would vote for any elected official that ran on a platform of “internalizing externalities”. Almost all the problems we face today are the result of someone’s actions benefiting only as a result negative externalities and so they scale up that action. It’s madness.
Germany, Slovakia and a few other countries have pushed the responsibility of recycling PET bottles onto the producers and retailers: There is a 25 cent deposit on a 2 liter PET bottle. Consumers deposit their bottles into machines at the retailer for a 25 c discount on their purchase. Frequently there are queues at those machines. My guess is that people earn less than minimum wage recycling.
Hungary (and Romania) have no deposit on their pet bottles, but some retailers do have similar machines. Consumers get 1 forint for every bottle they deposit. That's 1 dollar for every 400 bottles returned!
Earlier this year, I found that soda/cola/pop is more expensive in Slovakia than Hungary (at Lidl). So the retailers raise prices, hurting the poor.
Sweet water isn't food. It's poison. Doubly so for artificial sweeteners.
There's an abundance of other flavored water choices, for all peoples. Some even non-harmful. Coffee, tea, horchata, oat milk, lemonaides, frescas, aqua du jamaica, seltzer, ad nauseum.
Poor people need (and deserve) free and abundant potable water. Not soda.
Raising prices on soda isn’t exactly hurting the poor anymore than taxes on cigarettes do, it’s an unnecessary and unhealthy product that then increase the healthcare cost to them and the state. Poor people need variety and choice, but not unbridled “choice” as decided by Coca Cola and other soft drink conglomerates and their extensive advertising budgets and marketing deals with convenience stores.
You could apply the same argument to food products. You buy food and it produces potentially harmful waste that has to be dealt with, so the producer should be held responsible, right? A tax if their food is thrown out uneaten, charges for how much burden their food puts on waste treatment plants.
Clearly ridiculous and creates a perverse incentive to put more sugars, less fillers, and less fiber into the foods. In the same way it's a bad idea with plastics; when plastic is the best solution then anything they use instead will be worse, and how much worse it'll be will be proportional to how much you inflate the cost of plastic (which must be significant since plastic is often the far superior choice).
What does make sense -- just like human waste treatment plants for food waste -- is plastic and other waste incineration plants. They're not cheap or profitable on their own, but they solve the actual problem in a fair and equitable manner without creating perverse incentives. Publicly funded research to create packaging materials better than plastic is another reasonable solution, but it may be that plastic is the best we can do for now.
But raising the cost of plastic until it's unreasonable to use is like an inverse tragedy of the commons; solving a big problem causing many small ones instead of many small problems causing a big one.
You are only arguing against the against the packagers using other materials in response to the suggested regulation. (Also note that "increasing the cost to make plastic unenviable" is not the proposed regulation)
GP suggests that the packagers could also use easier-to-recycle plastic, or raise prices to pay for collecting and sorting.
As an example: Bottle deposits work well - IIRC resulting in 70-90% of all bottles being collected. Much harder to implement for general plastic waste of course, but it show that recycling can sort of work:
PET recycling:
> Worldwide, approximately 7.5 million tons of PET were collected in 2011. This gave 5.9 million tons of flake. In 2009 3.4 million tons were used to produce fibre, 500,000 tons to produce bottles, 500,000 tons to produce APET sheet for thermoforming, 200,000 tons to produce strapping tape and 100,000 tons for miscellaneous applications. Thus only approximately 15% of collected PET bottles were actually recycled into new bottles, the rest being used in generally non-recyclable products.
15% recycled isn't great from a "circular economy" perspective, but most of the rest is downcycled which probably is also a good thing. (although if that flake is used instead of more environmentally friendly alternatives due the probably dirt-cheap price the equation becomes more complex.)
Raising the price is only necessary if you can't figure out a way to dispose of it properly. Maybe that's the case. If so, then we shouldn't be using it at all. So it would be a good outcome in that case if it is "unreasonable to use".
>, or raising prices and using the proceeds to pay for effective collection efforts and so forth.
Of course, i agree with the proposal, but i fear it would require some serious strongarming from a higher body to actually ensure the monies taken ended up being actually used correctly.
Which would probably cost more money.
That's not viable either. Should companies control what their customers do with a physical product? That would destroy right to repair, just for starters.
Consumers MUST take responsibility for what they buy, if they should have the freedom to use them how they wish.
> Consumers MUST take responsibility for what they buy
How are they expected to do that when the vast majority of products they buy are wrapped in excessive amounts of plastic (and when the very few exceptions are more expensive)? The only reasonable solution here is to address the supply side of the equation.
The article is kind of hysterical, but has some interesting information in. I always wondered what to do with plastic bags and bottles and stuff in places where there is no rubbish collection. Burning seems popular, but despite looking up DIY home incineration it seems like not much effort is being put into this.
I also wondered why there aren't deposits on plastic bottles like there are on glass bottles. In the end it should probably be up to the companies who produce them, like Coca Cola to deal with them, but there probably needs to be an incentive to return them.
What happens if someone poops in the bottle and then recycles it. I guess that's just the American in me probably. Probably why those efforts die here.
I don’t think we see floating islands of paper bags and marine life strangled on cotton bag straps. Their measure of the impact of widespread disposable plastic use is carbon emission, which is not the only environmental impact we have. Using products that degrade in nature lets our waste degrade in nature when it ends up in nature.
As the article implies: The source of the plastic in the ocean are poorer Asian countries (India, Vietnam, Cambodia, China). The reason is that these countries lack (a) properly designed landfills (b) the logistics to send all their trash to landfills and (c) a culture of putting trash in bins.
Asian countries will not transition to paper bags and cotton bag straps because it's too expensive and not as convenient as plastic.
They also note that a lot of developed countries plastic trash ends up in countries with less tight controls. So reducing that export of plastic should help. Finally, just because someone else does something bad doesn’t justify doing it yourself and compounding the problem.
CO2 emission from plastics is pretty small. Only 4% of fossil fuels goes towards plastics, and they mostly last so long that that doesn't even turn into CO2. If CO2 is your concern, there are much larger producers to focus efforts on.
Terrible article. At some point we will have to do something about plastic that's not in our comfort zone.
As someone who lives on an island in Brazil, we have tons of plastic from all over the world being washed up on our shore. It's not a "developing countries" problem, our oceans depend on it, our lives depend on it, so forbidding something we can't manage seems like a pretty good solution to me.
How to take a bunch of true facts - and reach a completely unsupportable conclusion.
Yes, banning single use plastic is going to be painful and inconvenient, but one could likewise argue that for the addict, going without your drug is painful and inconvenient.
> Americans welcomed plastic products and packages because they were so much better than the alternative. Cellophane was considered a marvel because it was both moisture-proof and transparent, keeping food fresher and enabling grocery shoppers to see what they were buying. Advertisements featured housewives rejoicing that disposable plates and glasses freed them from dishwashing chores.
just calling it like i see it, but this reads like a sales pitch from the oil industry
The author's know-it-all attitude and intrusive politics make it very hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously. I’m up for a discussion, but not when the starting position is ‘everyone who disagrees with me is a malicious idiot.’
Readit News
Hungary (and Romania) have no deposit on their pet bottles, but some retailers do have similar machines. Consumers get 1 forint for every bottle they deposit. That's 1 dollar for every 400 bottles returned!
Earlier this year, I found that soda/cola/pop is more expensive in Slovakia than Hungary (at Lidl). So the retailers raise prices, hurting the poor.
Besides the soda being bad aspect, how is this hurting the poor? They can return the bottle for money, the system is working as intended.
Same rhetoric is used against soda tax.
Sweet water isn't food. It's poison. Doubly so for artificial sweeteners.
There's an abundance of other flavored water choices, for all peoples. Some even non-harmful. Coffee, tea, horchata, oat milk, lemonaides, frescas, aqua du jamaica, seltzer, ad nauseum.
Poor people need (and deserve) free and abundant potable water. Not soda.
Clearly ridiculous and creates a perverse incentive to put more sugars, less fillers, and less fiber into the foods. In the same way it's a bad idea with plastics; when plastic is the best solution then anything they use instead will be worse, and how much worse it'll be will be proportional to how much you inflate the cost of plastic (which must be significant since plastic is often the far superior choice).
What does make sense -- just like human waste treatment plants for food waste -- is plastic and other waste incineration plants. They're not cheap or profitable on their own, but they solve the actual problem in a fair and equitable manner without creating perverse incentives. Publicly funded research to create packaging materials better than plastic is another reasonable solution, but it may be that plastic is the best we can do for now.
But raising the cost of plastic until it's unreasonable to use is like an inverse tragedy of the commons; solving a big problem causing many small ones instead of many small problems causing a big one.
GP suggests that the packagers could also use easier-to-recycle plastic, or raise prices to pay for collecting and sorting.
As an example: Bottle deposits work well - IIRC resulting in 70-90% of all bottles being collected. Much harder to implement for general plastic waste of course, but it show that recycling can sort of work:
PET recycling:
> Worldwide, approximately 7.5 million tons of PET were collected in 2011. This gave 5.9 million tons of flake. In 2009 3.4 million tons were used to produce fibre, 500,000 tons to produce bottles, 500,000 tons to produce APET sheet for thermoforming, 200,000 tons to produce strapping tape and 100,000 tons for miscellaneous applications. Thus only approximately 15% of collected PET bottles were actually recycled into new bottles, the rest being used in generally non-recyclable products.
15% recycled isn't great from a "circular economy" perspective, but most of the rest is downcycled which probably is also a good thing. (although if that flake is used instead of more environmentally friendly alternatives due the probably dirt-cheap price the equation becomes more complex.)
Of course, i agree with the proposal, but i fear it would require some serious strongarming from a higher body to actually ensure the monies taken ended up being actually used correctly. Which would probably cost more money.
Consumers MUST take responsibility for what they buy, if they should have the freedom to use them how they wish.
How are they expected to do that when the vast majority of products they buy are wrapped in excessive amounts of plastic (and when the very few exceptions are more expensive)? The only reasonable solution here is to address the supply side of the equation.
I also wondered why there aren't deposits on plastic bottles like there are on glass bottles. In the end it should probably be up to the companies who produce them, like Coca Cola to deal with them, but there probably needs to be an incentive to return them.
Asian countries will not transition to paper bags and cotton bag straps because it's too expensive and not as convenient as plastic.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/new-greenpeace-report-pl...
Yes, banning single use plastic is going to be painful and inconvenient, but one could likewise argue that for the addict, going without your drug is painful and inconvenient.
The 'plastic wrap' you buy now, however, is likely made from PET.