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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

> The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries.

At the risk of sounding like an industry shill: why is it being characterized as an cost externalization by the petrochemical/packaging industries, rather than the consumers? I agree that any pollution generated during extraction and manufacture can be attributed as an externalize of the packaging/petrochemical industry, but why should they be on the hook after it leaves their hands? Consumers are using the said products, reaping the benefits (either in cheaper products or greater convenience), and pay for their disposal via tax dollars or fees. I guess you could argue that companies should be responsible for the entire lifecycle, but then it becomes a slippery slope. Is the automotive industry externalizing the cost of roads? Is the food industry externalizing the cost of sewer systems? Are electronics manufacturers externalizing the cost of electricity?

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They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics. I don’t think consumers are blameless, but you can’t get everyone in the world to change their purchasing behavior without regulation, which is necessary when lower prices are subsidized by huge externalities that have negative consequences for the world at large.

"They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics."

Plastics are an absolutely incredible technology, to the point of revolutionary. They are used absolutely everywhere, in everything.

Nobody needed to be convinced of the utility of plastics, it's one of the most utilitarian things ever created.

So, they lied when they didn't even need to. Doesn't that make the lie that much worse?

They marketed their industry, just as every industry does.

They promoted something they understood to be a fiction because they knew it would offset reasonable concerns about their product. If you think that’s the core of marketing then we have very different ideas about what good marketing is.

Give this episode of planet money a listen: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land

It discusses extensively the knowledge the petro chemical lobby knew about the ability to recycle plastic and how little could really be recycled.

>huge externalities that have negative consequences for the world at large.

What are these negative consequences? The only ones I can think of are related to improper disposal (eg. littering), and would be present regardless of whether the material was recyclable or not. ie. if we replaced all the non-recyclable plastic bottles with 100% recyclable aluminum cans, the littering problem would still be there.

An idea is to get the companies to internalize these costs through a carbon tax which can be invested into climate change action (which is another story). At the moment, the consequence is that companies have zero incentive to act for the planet, so they will continue their behaviors.

Perhaps they pass some of these costs down to consumers which makes them less likely to purchase (and then litter) non-biodegradables. Or they can provide a cheaper good to avoid a carbon tax which encourages consumer to buy that alternative.

If the plastic is sequestered in a landfill, then what is the carbon externality?

Does decomposing plastic emit methane?

I think it's important to at least partially separate the issues of climate change from plastic pollution. For some reason these two have become entwined together in the public mind. We need to get a handle on plastic pollution, and yes, it's a product of the petrochemical industry so there is that, but it's not the same type or scale of problem as the emergency around tailpipe / smokestack CO2 or methane emissions.

Forget recyclable aluminum cans, use refillable glass bottles with a meaningful deposit ($0.25 or more).

I agree that just changing the material is not the solution. But it doesn't mean that the manufacturers get to skip their responsibility. In Finland we have to pay a considerable deposit by law (found in section 2: https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/2013/en20130526.pdf) for every drink container you buy and you get the deposit back when you return them back to any store that has a returning machine (almost every single place you can buy those bottles). It seems that this is working very nicely, since the return rates are around 90% (https://www.palpa.fi/beverage-container-recycling/deposit-re...). Usually when drunk people are throwing beer cans to the streets, there's almost always someone picking up those cans for the deposit.

I'm not an expert, but I think the problem is that in the US, The industry would never allow that kind of decree to pass, since in this case "The manufacturers and importers of beverages fund return systems through different types of payments."

> why should they be on the hook after it leaves their hands? Consumers are using the said products

Consumers aren't typically buying plastic packaging. They're buying whatever the plastic packaging contains.

When regular people buy plastic packaging and throw it away, then yes they are culpable (as in plastic bags and wrap for food storage, which I'll admit that I do use on occasion).

The rest of the time, it's not really the consumer's decision.

That's not correct.

I'd much rather buy a plastic bottle of water than a heavy glass one.

Water is/should be damn near free in any wealthy nation.

There shouldn’t even be a market for single-use water (not on the scale it exists in the USA anyway).

Water is essentially free. You are paying for the container.

Making the containers free will just drive up wastage.

Not free plastic bottles; free water (at fountains and suchlike).

We should be using reusable bottles and filling them on demand at public fountains, not running into the quickie mart and buying Evian 1/2 liter at a time.

Go into literally any establishment and ask for free tap water, and most will let you have it - FOR FREE

Probably not if the product in a plastic bottle is much more expensive than the same thing in a glass bottle, right?

Were asbestos manufacturers externalizing the cost of asbestos? Are car, plane and ship manufacturers externalizing the cost of CO2? Are cigarette manufacturers externalizing the cost of cigarette butts?

The difference between your examples and examples like plastic and the ones above is that yours are a one time cost with little to no negative externalities - hell most of them have positive externalities. I would pay money for a sewer system and electricity (and do!) - whiles the ones like plastic, asbestos and CO2 have no positive externality to anyone, including the people consuming them and stick around for basically ever. We then need to pay to remove them sometime down the line if we want a livable world.

> Were asbestos manufacturers externalizing the cost of asbestos? Are car, plane and ship manufacturers externalizing the cost of CO2? Are cigarette manufacturers externalizing the cost of cigarette butts?

In the examples given I don't disagree there was externalites being produced, I only disagree with the characterization that it was caused by the manufacturers[1]. Taking some examples from wikipedia[2]:

* In the case of Water pollution, I would say the entity causing the externality is the chemical plant doing the polluting, not the chemical plant for the precursor chemicals

* In the case of spam, I would say the spammers are causing the externality, not the authors of SMTP clients

* In the case of noise pollution, I would say the construction workers are causing the externality, not the makers of the jackhammers

>The difference between your examples and examples like plastic and the ones above is that yours are a one time cost with little to no negative externalities - hell most of them have positive externalities.

And what about the road network that auto manufacturers depend upon? Sure, we still might need one even without cars, but would need orders of magnitude less (in terms of area). We, the tax payers and residents are paying for the road network in the form of dollars need to maintain it, and the various quality of life damages that arise from it (noise pollution, air pollution, unwalkable cities, etc.).

[1] literally the first sentence of my initial comment: "why is it being characterized as an cost externalization by the petrochemical/packaging industries, rather than the consumers"

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

I might be in the minority, but I don't read you as being a shill. It's a reasonable framing of the problem, i.e., not as a problem of production but of disposal. We already have markets, taxes and subsidies around the waste disposal lifecycle. What if we simply left it to waste disposal firms to run?

I suspect there is criticism in two areas, one in that putting the costs on consumers is either unreasonable or impractical. I don't agree it's unreasonable, but concede that it may be politically undesirable. The other is that waste disposal firms are likely to continue to do harm in the form of dumping waste into oceans (or similar approaches), which I see as fair. I'd be in favor of pursuing disincentives to such practices.

All you have to do if you're looking for a "market" solution to this, is price in the externality somewhere. What portion of the externality the consumer and the producer end up being responsible for will ultimately be decided by the price of the product. As for why the externality should be recouped at the industry level, the accounting is just a lot less expensive there.

What externalizes? Most talk of the externalities assumes some quantity that exists somewhere, but without a good reason to believe they exist why should we?

A simple example is the current cost of recycling plastic: it's too expensive so it won't happen. Consequently putting these on the sheet as an externalities doesn't make sense Forcing it to happen is probably nonsensical, why not fund research into plastic recycling instead instead of deadening the economy through unintended consequences?

It seems you either don't know what an externality is, or you don't understand how plastic is an externality. In the second case, I literally cannot help you. Try to imagine yourself as a member of the ecosystem which is actively collapsing? The oxygen you are breathing isn't made in a lab.

The creation, purchase, and disposal of plastic has consequences for people that are not involved in that chain, and therefore have no ability to be compensated (or in the case where those consequences produce a societal benefit, compensate) in this transaction.

This is a very common market failure. Most "transactions" actually effect everybody. One of the roles of government (and I suspect there are some radical economists that would say the only role of government) is to measure these external costs of transactions, and tax or subsidize the transactions accordingly. Externalities represent an essentially infinite amount of market failure, and the heuristics that are employed for dealing with them are almost necessarily very crude.

In the case of bottles, we are saying "Hey, we estimate the environmental damage of one plastic bottle at %d, and we are charging you that amount to sell one".

What specifically, and how large (dollars / plastic item/unit) are these externalites? If you can't describe and quantify them then there isn't an argument for compensating (taxes, bans) against them.

[0] e.g. If I dump 100 PET soda bottles into the ocean how many humans would be inconvenienced, how many fish killed? My napkin math says essentially none of either.

Hol up.

Dumping those plastics in the ocean begins a cycle of creating microplastics. These plastic particles are being incorporated in food chains and the ramifications of this are not understood at this time, and may take some time to figure out.

Your napkin math says this? So it must be right then... Surely all that is required for such a decision on the scale of every human doing this every year is some napkin math.

Napkin math is better than your complete lack of anything that resembles a number.

No, it's not. Napkin math is utterly useless here, and I think you don't understand utility.

Ultimately, all utility functions (strategy space to R), when integrated over the rest of time, produce either a finite value, or an infinite value. Trying to figure out which, for a given strategy, is in general undecidable.

Numbers sort of break down at this point. Or at least numbers as linear constructs. Humanity lives in a dynamical system, and as long as that dynamical system is stable enough (eigenvalues all near 1), we know from observation that evolution (in the biological sense) is capable of maintaining the invariants required to sustain human life and civilization. I will call this the flight envelope of life on earth.

This is an extraordinary gift. If I can prove that Humanity's strategy preserves these invariants, I can count on evolution to extend our presence more or less indefinitely, at least up to the point where the sun runs out of hydrogen or we are struck by some very large celestial object.

The squandering of this gift, by failing to maintain these invariants, has a literally incalculable cost. If we voluntarily exit the flight envelope of life, it is impossible to tell what will happen as a result, but it won't be as good as whatever we can get by staying in it. So my back of the napkin math says that the correct price to place on disposal of plastic into the ocean is "don't". There is no world in which the marginal utility of 50 trillion plastic bottles is greater than staying in the flight envelope.

They don't last forever, the econonmy is not going to be in its current form for even a few hundred years, and if we're going with current methods the oil will run out too.

And you didn't even give a reason that plastic would kick us out of the flight envelope if we ignore those flaws in the argument.

So your very last line is true but you have done basically nothing to demonstrate that we have to choose between the two.

You don't understand. The invariant to be maintained is the (amount of plastic in the oceans). Failing to maintain that invariant is a bad idea SIMPLY because you are failing to maintain it. Increasing the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a bad idea even if we have no conception of global warming.

We're failing to maintain a million randomly selected invariants, though. "I can measure it" is a terrible motivating reason to keep something the same, and it would be impossible to maintain every invariant.

So instead we should look at actual harm and/or cleanup cost.

The irony of suggesting cleanup cost here, I just don't know. Cleaning up maintains the invariant. You have successfully put the intrinsic price tag on the externality. Well done.

Please don't deliberately interpret my comment to be the weakest form.

Looking at what it would cost to clean up doesn't have to mean actually cleaning. But let's remove that part, because the important part is to look at actual harm.

Especially because if you can't tell me the relationship between plastic levels and harm, and you can't tell me how much is too much, what if I decide we've already broken the invariant and there's no point in reducing any more?

I only suggested looking at cleanup cost to get a better understanding of how to handle the harm. Not because we have a magic list of which things must be cleaned up and which things don't need to be.

Because you'd need such a magic list. Otherwise how do we know that we don't need to blow up all our houses because they're violating an invariant, or something similarly crippling? What if Earth can only safely supply 10 million humans in the long term, for a fun possible invariant.

You cannot measure "actual" harm, because the system is dynamical.

You wanted a definition of externality, I gave it to you. There's a function that gives you the upper bound on the cost of an externality, which for lack of a better term, we can call the clean up function. This is the cost of returning the system to its original state.

You don't need a magic list, you need a way of demonstrating that certain actions are within the flight envelope of the environment, ie, there is some corrective force within the environment that maintains the invariant for you, and a policy of denying all actions that do not come with such a demonstration. The list can expand as scientific understanding expands, and we are allowed some leeway by the intrinsic stability of the system. If evolution could not absorb some unexpected perturbations, we wouldn't exist in the first place, but we should treat this as a finite resource, for which we do not have an amount.

Evidence that we don't do this at all is just you being in denial about the terribleness of the human strategy.

Imagine, for metaphor, that you are in some (solar powered) alien plane, and the pilot dies. You go into the cockpit, knowing that you just have to keep the plane flying. You make a mental note that all of the instruments on the panel are fixed, and the position of all of the controls. You decide that you want to fly faster so you fiddle around with the contrls until you can tell that the landscape is going underneath you faster than it was before. You note that some instrument on the panel is increasing. Do you A) ignore it, or B) return the controls to their original state?

If you can't measure it how do you know it exists? That is at least half of my point, the other half being you can't assume a specific course of action is necessary and proper without demonstrating the harm actually occurred. That you think harm might occur is not enough, you need to show it has occurred (and can probably use proof of past harm to show that inevitable harm will occur).

Your example is disingenuous because a cockpit instrument by definition monitors something you want to pay attention to. We can measure and record many things, most of which are probably irrelevant to many problems and their solutions.

Here is a recent Frontline on how the petro-chem industry fooled consumers: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/. Advocates may be gearing up for a lawsuit, similar to what happened to the cigarette companies.

The industry and their advocacy groups reduced their costs by switching to packaging, proceeded to lie to consumers and government that all this new packaging was going to be easily recycled and not to worry.

I don't see where consumers are on the hook? We were told that plastic was better (e.g. the switch from paper bags to plastic).

As a comparison to electronics industry in many jurisdictions there are recycling fees paid at the time of purchase. Those fees are paid to recyclers to tear down equipment into raw materials to be re-used. The electronics industry didn't mislead anyway suggesting recycling could pay for itself nor add recycling symbols to suggest you could drop a TV in your blue recycle bin.

>I don't see where consumers are on the hook? We were told that plastic was better (e.g. the switch from paper bags to plastic).

No, that's just fraud. Externality has a very specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality. In this case a third party isn't bearing the cost. It's still the consumer (via taxes or garbage disposal fees).

>As a comparison to electronics industry in many jurisdictions there are recycling fees paid at the time of purchase.

That's simply a different way of raising funds for waste disposal. I suspect it's not used for other forms of packaging because they don't require special handling, and therefore the cost is so marginal that it's not worth collecting.

The fraud was in denying the externality, which is on the environment in the form of massive amounts of material that can’t be recycled and which do not biodegrade.

>which is on the environment in the form of massive amounts of material that can’t be recycled

Why is that bad? It's not like we're running out of landfill space (at least in the US), and it's not like plastic in a landfill leeches chemicals into the drinking water or something.

> and which do not biodegrade

I don't think anyone was fooled into thinking that plastics were biodegradable.

>Why is that bad? It's not like we're running out of landfill space (at least in the US), and it's not like plastic in a landfill leeches chemicals into the drinking water or something.

Because it's not all going into landfills, it's ending up as litter and giant floating pallets of plastic in the middle of the ocean.

>I don't think anyone was fooled into thinking that plastics were biodegradable.

No, but metal, glass, and paper are all either recyclable or biodegradable or both.

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