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Comment by aSplash0fDerp | Hacker News Reader

Its the industries and businesses with the plastic addiction problem, not the consumer.

This is similar to making a bad long-term bet and having to pay up. There are a lot of other attractive choices to plastic, but the window to transition seemlessly appears to be closing more and more each week.

Seeing the death of coal should give them a map to follow. They made a bad bet on the future too.

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it’s a tragedy of the commons problem. plastic is essentially free, so once one manufacturer can make the same consumer quality product with plastic instead of [whatever else], it forces the hands of all other manufacturers.

this needs to be solved with regulation.

The simple solution is to move the disposal cost to the producer. Instead of the consumer paying taxes to dispose of the product, the producer must pay and now a producer which produces less waste can sell cheaper products.

There is such a system in Germany, called Grüner Punkt or Duales System. They tax manufacturers' packaging and run the collection and recycling from that tax income.

Imho it didn't help all that much. I did not find numbers for the reduction in packaging, but my impresssion is "none". As for recycling the waste they collect, there are numbers between "half is just icinerated" and "only 5% is recycled": https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duales_System_(Abfallwirtsch...

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