Hacker News Reader

Much innovation in the last 20 years has been finding ways to get your customers to do work for free that you previously paid employees to do instead.

For example, self-service checkouts in supermarkets, fast food, building a holiday package, etc.

Recycling is the same. They have 'outsourced' much of the job to local government and consumers.

View on HN

To add: other than cost transfer, it enables better scaling for the companies.

That's not really the case. It's simply a really hard problem and that's easiest to address early on (recycle somewhat right) than to try and filter useful things out of shredded sludge.

It's a really hard problem that big companies show no signs of helping to solve because they have no economic interest in doing so. They use whatever packaging helps their short-term profits without consideration of long-term environmental damage.

It's a typical externalities problem - the full cost of using some types of packaging is not paid by the one doing the packaging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com