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Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

But such a tax gives no incentive for companies to change their packaging. The tax is paid by the customer who usually has few or no options.

For example in the UK plastic one-litre milk pitcher bottles are ubiquitous. Even the few remaining door-to-door milkmen deliver them, instead of the old one-pint reusable glass bottles. I simply can't buy fresh milk in anything else and i have a recycling bin full of them.

Reverting to glass would add weight, breakages and collection costs to the companies. So they wouldn't have any incentive to change under a tax scheme when they don't pay it. Only a ban will change their behaviour.

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If they have no incentive to change then the tax is too low. A tax that's sufficiently high to offset all the externalities is better than a ban because it gives people more flexibility. If somebody is unusually harmed by a ban they might choose to pay the tax even if it's high. And tax is fungible, so the money can be used to prevent other sources of environmental damage, and the overall outcome is better than if it was banned outright.

Thanks for making this point. I feel like most taxes miss the point of externalities. Taxes used to dissuade an activity should be high enough to matter. I tend to not trust low tax amounts on policies meant to lessen an activity. They “look good” but often they just become a hidden money maker for something else not really designed to make a difference.

In Ireland, we introduced a tax on plastic bags in 2002 and it had an enormous impact. (Actually we called it a levy: Irish governments never introduce new taxes, but love to introduce new levies!)

One detail works in its favour surprisingly well: once you've paid, the vendor cannot give you a plastic bag. A new transaction must take place as part of every sale "would you like a plastic bag?" and this turned out to apply a substantial friction on their distribution.

> Actually we called it a levy: Irish governments never introduce new taxes, but love to introduce new levies!

What the difference? Everywhere else I've heard the term, a levy is something very different.

If plastic bottle costs more then a glass/metal one then you will buy the metal one, metal can be recycled, glass can be reused, the company that sells plastic will go out of business in a short time.

I am OK with a ban too but I think some political ideology will hate that but will allow a fiar costs that includes the price of cleanup/recycling

> If plastic bottle costs more then a glass/metal one then you will buy the metal one

There is truth in that, but the consumer situation in the UK is currently that plastic is the only choice. Not that it's the cheapest.

> Reverting to glass would add weight, breakages and collection costs

So how exactly is glass superior to plastic in this application? Seems to me that they moved to plastic because plastic is the better material for the job.

Need to ask not just which is better, but which is better for who?

With glass, producing new bottles for each delivery would be super expensive, so it is in their interest to bear the cost of collecting the bottles for reuse and recycling.

With plastic, producing new containers is super cheap, so it is fine to continuously produce new ones, but the waste is still produced, so the customers and their local government must bear the cost of waste disposal or recycling instead.

Essentially, moving from glass to plastic is good for the producers, as they no-longer need to care how much it costs to recycle, since they don't do it any more. But the overall cost to society might be higher, depending exactly on what the recycling costs are.

One problem is that we don't know the full cost, including the environmental impact, of each option.

Glass can be cleaned and reused, but it's heavier, so transporting it both ways results in increased emissions. They could also choose to use reusable plastic containers (soda companies did this in Norway up until around 5-6 years ago), but collecting the used containers takes up much more space if they can't be compacted, which I think some grocery stores do now.

There's quite a bit of energy that goes into washing containers as well. Supposedly sometimes more than what is required to manufacture new ones.

I'm not sure we as society are really able to quantify the environmental costs of each just yet.

We could at least get somewhat reasonable estimates I think, there should be enough countries with bottle-collecting schemes to get useful data about actual effort involved.

They can move to tin cans like soda cans, which have remarkably little metal in them. No need to wash them, just throw them in the hopper with the rest of the ore.

Glass bottles survived typically 25-50 round trips during reuse, sometimes much longer if there was a deposit paid. Plastic as used in milk cartons is extremely easy to spoil causing the recycled batch to be worthless. To avoid this the washing of the material (even after the householder has been required to do so) is done at higher temperature and pressure, with multiple hot, cold and abrasive steps.

They have to ensure any food residue, glue, labels and any remnants of the under-cap seal are removed or it's junk[0]. It's significantly more expensive than washing and rinsing glass bottles used to be.

[0] http://www.petbottlewashingline.com/pet-bottle-washing-line/

Taxes will eventually get passed down to the customer no doubt, but that'll increase the cost for the customer, and hopefully make them think twice about purchasing it or go for other alternatives. When a 1 lb bag of carrots costs $1 more than loose carrots, you'd prefer to go for the loose carrots and BYOB.

A good example on how taxes help, is the extra cost you have to bear when you want plastic bags at checkout. Almost everyone I've seen at retailers bring their own bag. It also looks better.

It doesn't really matter who pays for what in the upstream. What matters is the final price to the consumer. So if milk producer A switches to glass bottles and can sell milk at a lower final price to the consumer, they will be at a competitive advantage to milk producer B who uses plastic bottles and then has a higher final price to the consumer.

That's assuming that the extra costs of glass bottles are still lower than the tax on the plastic ones.

The most common milk packaging here in Sweden is plastic-coated paper carton. Wonder how that fits with the mumbai law, and how it compare to reusable glass bottles.

Aren't combinations of materials generally harder to recycle? Presumably you have to split the plastic from the paper and recycle each separately?

The recycling instructions on the packaging says to recycle it the same as paper packaging.

I'm not even sure which is better for the environment or easier to recycle.

Probably neither as dairy farming in an ugly business.

You can still buy milk in glass bottles in some stores in Germany, but that milk is more expensive.

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