I still don't understand why we don't have a general tax on using certain materials that are hard to recycle or cause waste, if you taxed plastic per gram and made it more expensive to use than cardboard or aluminium we would see a major switch.
Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
451–460 of 460 posts
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
* Toothpaste can be made and or bought from places like Lush where the alternatives can be zero waste. It's a bit out of the ordinary but there are options that even I'm surprised by it. * Just about all produce/fruit is available without plastic wrapping (except for berries I've found, which is quite annoying). I think the only non-plastic option here is to just try and grow the fruit yourself. Or otherwise take the…
Meat is easy for me, I just head to the butcher that’s next to the shops. Not only is it cheaper and higher quality, but the only plastic used is the extremely thin bag they wrap the meat in, and they’re happy to use paper instead if you bring it!
There's only one butcher (amazingly) in the area that I live in, and it's only open 8:30 - 5:30 Monday through Friday, which doesn't work for anyone working full time.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#453This is a classic externality problem. We can berate consumers all day long to be more diligent in their recycling, but all that finger wagging is for show meant to distract from the real source of the garbage, the manufacturers. Just like the classic "blame the user" mentality, the users were given an impossibly complex system with barely any incentive to get it right. Nothing about the interface is intuitive or dis…
The incentive should be preserving the environment around you, and you cannot do this by forcing people, you need to educate them instead.
"real source of the garbage, the manufacturers": yeah, except they are catering to the needs of the consumers, without consumers, they would go bankrupt, and on top of that, you can just boycott them.
It's exactly government regulations and subsidies that cripple the market, and you people's solution is to cripple it even more? Sounds legit. It's almost as if we have been trying that for the past few decades, without success, in fact: it keeps backfiring... but yeah, regulate away!
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#454TLDR:
> 91 percent of potentially recyclable plastic in the U.S. ended up in landfills – or worse, in the oceans.
> Yes, trash has become complicated
> Even if consumer participation in recycling were 100 percent, we wouldn’t be close to recycling 100 percent of the material [...]
> [...] nearly all current “recyclable” plastics [...] get a second life as a handbag or lawn chair [...]. They’re not really recycled so much as “downcycled.”
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one stops anyone from providing that service.
Maybe it depends on the city, but often it's a municipal government granted monopoly. E.g. in San Francisco it's Recology. https://www.aoausa.com/magazine/?p=4982 I bet, each city, that enforces waste sorting, has a monopoly.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I meant is a sorting service, not a collection service.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
One problem with environmental degradation is that effects are often non-linear whereas taxes are typically linear. So "do all the X you want" is not the appropriate response if the tax is simply used as a lever to move behaviour in one direction. On the other hand, if the government is selling emission rights then this can model non-linear effects. Then it makes sense to say, "go on, use your rights to the full exte…
If you won't quantify how bad the damage is and how much you'd need to erase it, and therefore what at what tax rate you'd be fine with someone consuming to their heart's content, then you think the cost is infinite and therefore have no business proposing policy to begin with.
"Someone consuming to their heart's content" is not bounded.
It seems to me you're arguing that just because a tax is a blunt tool it shouldn't be used at all. But tax rate doesn't have to be set in stone, it can be adjusted dynamically in a feedback loop.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because you can't easily put the blame on individuals doesn't mean they're not responsible. Our "system" is great at "blame laundering" or obfuscating ethical implications of decisions through diffusion of responsibility and removal of context at different boundaries. But the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way. Leaders who don't act to change…
> the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way Strongly disagree with that assessment; viewing systems as solely the product of individual decisions is like viewing your brain solely as the product of the movement of individual atoms. You lose all predictive capability. If you do something immoral, is there some group of cells or atoms that I can direct…
If there is a hierarchical structure to the brain wherein some highly influential neurons direct the rest of the brain toward the immoral behavior, you can at least assign the lions share to them.
I do agree that carefully structured incentives and disincentives are the thing that can lead to the best outcomes.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you won't quantify how bad the damage is and how much you'd need to erase it, and therefore what at what tax rate you'd be fine with someone consuming to their heart's content, then you think the cost is infinite and therefore have no business proposing policy to begin with.
"Someone consuming to their heart's content" is not bounded. It seems to me you're arguing that just because a tax is a blunt tool it shouldn't be used at all. But tax rate doesn't have to be set in stone, it can be adjusted dynamically in a feedback loop.
No, I'm saying that advocates should be clear about what the precise harms are and that taxes should be used to ameliorate the harms of the taxed activity, and that anyone unable to put such numbers on it is not advocating a serious policy we should listen to.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#459If we can't robotically seperate the different types of plastic presently, could we tag new plastics with something machine readable? Bar codes seem impracticle for some uses. So just invent a micro tag, I guess.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't be surprised if "Pack the box back up and burn a bunch more jet fuel sending it back to New York" turns out to be even worse than just sending it all to the landfill. Given that they require air mailing boxes full of (mostly, by weight) frozen liquids all over the place on a weekly basis, I'm not convinced that these meal kit services can ever be made sustainable. Compared to that cost, worrying about recy…
We subscribed to Terra’s Kitchen after trying a few services including Blue Apron and Freshly. Terra’s Kitchen, in addition to using non-disposable, durable vessels and cold packs that you return, also pre-chops and pre-preps many of the ingredients so meal prep and cleanup is truly 20-30 mins, which is half the time (or less) than Blue Apron. Here are the vessels they use: https://www.terraskitchen.com/how-it-works/…
So Terra's Kitchen basically sends customers a mini fridge filled with raw ingredients?