Comment by bob_theslob646 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob_theslob646 | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate the authors of this post for their effort in raising awareness but I think it will fall on deaf ears.

A few things that they mentioned that they didn't go into crazy depth are origination of plastic(s), transportation costs of waste, and taxation as a policy to reduce waste.

Did you know that glass is reusable, unfortunately it's so heavy that it's worth nothing to recycle.

The other problem is where the funding for recycling goes.

In the New York City metro area, a bottle deposit tax is used towards education. If everyone recycles, where/how is the government going to plug that hole, however small it may be?

The better question that the author should be asking is what type of policy(s) should be implemented in order to make it so that people want to or are forced to reuse verses to not even think about throwing things out.

The only conclusion that I see is a super high tax.

Unfortunately,most people don't really care unless it hits them in the wallet.

You would be suprised. You could make the fines incredibly high or jail people like they do in Singapore.

If Singapore can do it, why can't New York City?

I think the failure to reuse glass is a failure of imagination.

Why not have consumers refill product? Get your shampoo refilled at a machine in the aisle. Tax the plastic bottle.

You would have to make it punitively expensive for that to sway me. I pay $10 for a giant bottle of shampoo from Costco, if it suddenly became $10 + $5 plastic bottle tax I'd probably still just pay the $15 rather than refill the bottle.

I'd wager the same would not be true if that $5 saved after income tax represented 30 minutes or more of work on the job. Sure you might not refill the bottle but empty reusable bottle sowed become more common/affordable everywhere, and plenty of poorer people would definitely recycle. You're just a single person, if you're talking about policy you need to look at the total impact

The evidence is overwhelmingly against you[1], given how the plastic bag tax in Ireland and now the UK has shown it does significantly increase reuse, even for nominal amounts like a 5p charge per bag.

You might not want to save money, but most consumers do.

You're falling into the trap of "everyone is exactly like me", where you're in fact the exception, not the norm.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-...

I think bags are quite different: the hassle of reusable bags is really low, they weigh almost nothing, and they have other real advantages over the plastic bags (they don't break).

Many US states have bottle deposits for a similar "nominal" amount per bottle and the majority of people don't do it: when I was a broke college student some friends and I did it for a little while but the math really didn't work out even then.

Bottle deposits are very effective. Aluminum soda cans have a 60% recycling rate vs 30% for most other materials.

My Aunt & Uncle and in Holland did it all the time and as far as I could tell everyone did it (I'm from UK, we don't have a scheme like that).

In this article after a very quick google they report a 90% return rate in Holland (I'm not going to spend time digging into where the 90% comes from):

http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69

So it might be a cultural thing or it may be the deposit figure is too low. As far as I remember in Holland it was 10 cents when I was a kid in the 90s, which would be about a dime per bottle.

It certainly is cultural: in Switzerland the rate of recycling is extremely high without and deposit.

To clarify, in my experience what happens in the US is most people recycle bottles at curbside pickup, rather than drive somewhere to get 5 cents per can. In cities homeless tend to go around and collect all of the cans from the curb and redeem them.

This is not only cultural and has nothing to do with the Swiss being more ethical or better people.

As always, in Switzerland the system is very smart: The main reason for the high recycling rate in Switzerland is that a 35 liter trash bag costs around 80 cents. The cost for the garbagemen etc. is included in the purchase price of the trash-bag. (Also, the trash-bag is of high-quality and never rips, so garbagemen who get a >4000 CHF monthly salary, almost never waste time picking up trash from ripped trash-bags.)

This is unbelievably smart because this nudges people recycle everything: Paper, carton, glas, metal, and plastic bottles are all thrown away in extra containers that are distributed conveniently within the neighbourhoods. People really fill the expensive, high-quality trash-bags mostly with non-recyclable stuff. If you put in recyclable stuff there is no punishment or anything, you just have to buy more bags, which hurts your pocket.

Compare that to Germany where they rolled out a machinary of expensive plastic-bottle-bar-code reading robots in each and every supermarket that had to be engineered, maintained and protected against tampering/hacking/fraud with false bottles (from Eastern Europe).

Where there is a bottle tax poor people collecting and returning the bottles soon emerge. As long as you leave it somewhere accessible, someone will come and return it, especially for $5.

The giant bottles require less packaging material per unit of volume, so you’re already making a better choice.

Lack of creativity, and often bad reasons, inevitably result in taxation as a way to get people to behave how you'd like. Punish, punish, punish and maybe they'll learn something.

Because your health is generally safer when we don't.

Got MSRA on your throwaway plastic bottle, no problem it's going to the dump.

Got MSRA on your refillable bottle? Better steam clean it first or peoples heads might start falling off.

A high tax on garbage will only incent illegal disposal. Dumping stuff in ravines, on other people's property, etc.

Not necessarily, you could tax the production/sale of goods that usually contribute to garbage.

For example in Germany, it's mostly the producers of goods who have to pay for disposal of corresponding (packaging) waste, thereby creating an incentive to reduce packaging or rely on reusable bins etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)#German_dual...

I agree. Placing a greater burden on the side of the producers to deal with the trash they produce seems like the most logical approach to me. If X company wants to make something with a bunch of plastic packaging they will have to pay for the impact that will have. If they want that to eat into their profits, fine, but I think the more likely scenario is that that they will pass as much of that cost on to consumers as they can, ideally also driving down demand for those products.

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