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Comment by sfpotter | Hacker News Reader

Why should we not try to get the population to behave a certain way? The alternative is a society full of people who behave antisocially, acting as if only their needs matter. It’s hard to say whether a concerted effort to make people more invested in the civic good will be effective, but throwing our hands in the air will undoubtedly have the intended effect.

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I feel that this has things inverted. People generally don’t care about the packaging or even the materials in the product. Those choices are made almost entirely by the seller.

Why should the buyer be responsible for cleaning up the seller’s mess?

If it’s possible to economically create products that don’t produce waste then this should be mandated, because otherwise there will always be some asshole corporation who is willing to undercut competitors on price by externalising costs to the environment.

"Getting buyers and sellers to both behave responsibly is mutually exclusive."

The plastics lobby argued in favour of single use plastics many decades ago, and that's where the focus on end consumer responsibility comes from. These were literally the same PR firms that used those same tricks on behalf of the tobacco industry not long before that.

Putting the onus exclusively on the end consumer is the easiest way to ensure the industry doesn't bear the burden and expense, and that's entirely the point.

I am not advocating that we put the onus exclusively on the consumer.

Because changing one thing that has a huge impact (the manufacturer) is a lot easier than changing hundreds of millions of things with each a tiny impact (people's habits).

"It's hard so don't try."

How about, instead of doing the almost-impossible thing that is not necessary or logical (why should everyone else change in order to offset lost profits for a company that doesn't care about them?), do the easy thing that is practical and rational.

Or you can decry society for doing the easy thing, but remember that trying to shape outcomes when dealing with large numbers of people almost always leads to consequences that seem obvious in hindsight but were unpredictable at the onset.

FWIW in Washington state where I live (and in the 3 cities/towns I've lived in here), multiple times a year Waste Management/WM sends out a flyer explaining what can and can't be recycled. It changes over time and it's extra confusing because the recycle cans have different rules printed on them than what is in the flyer. We used to be able to recycle juice boxes and milk cartons, no more. Then we were supposed to recycle glass jars and their metal lids, but now "no lids of any kind." We were told to flatten and recycle all paperboard boxes, but now we are supposed to skip recycling any paperboard boxes that have a clear coating on them (every freezer box, according to their instructions). Plastic bags have always been prohibited. But of course I see my neighbors putting plastic bags in their cans all the time. There are so many rules about what plastics can be recycled that I can't even remember them.

I think the "education" aspect has been attempted and it's not working. It's time to go nuclear and have the government dictate what types of materials can be used for packaging and ban everything else.

If I never see another blister pack it will be too soon.

I can't speak for other countries, but in the US trying to get everybody on the same page in terms of recycling habits would be worse than herding cats.

It's not something anybody wants to put energy towards because they're trying to keep 50 other plates spinning at any given time (which as an aside, is also a huge source of plastic waste because nobody has the time or energy to cook) and there's also a chunk of the population who will take any kind of push to change behavior as a personal affront.

You can probably get a small percentage to adhere fully and a slightly larger to partially adhere, but I agree with parent comments that it's better to make companies use materials that are easier to recycle in the first place.

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but it isn't mutually exclusive with having the government do what it can do educate the public in order to get them behave more responsibly and civically minded. Obviously this would require a bit of a re-think in terms of what we value as a society. Doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying.

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