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Comment by somishere | Hacker News Reader

A lot of Australian coffee shops give a discount for bringing your own (takeaway) cup. Personally I think they should just charge/tax for single use cups, to the benefit of those sitting in or bringing their own.

Single use plastics, but not bioplastics, are on the way out across Australia, and some more conspicuous forms like bags have recently been phased out. With bags the first step was to start charging for them at the till, which led to many choosing to byo. This was followed by a blanket ban (in my state anyway) in September this year which had suprisingly little fallout.

I also kind of like the idea / various iterations of the Freiberg cup [1], but the fact that they are so easily replaceable makes me wonder how many just end up discarded (esp by those who don't like carrying around a used cup). But I'm sure these questions have answers / solutions.

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Those policies can easily backfire. Bags were banned in the UK for the supermarkets to sell or offer, except "bags for life" (thick reusable bags sold at a price of 20p or up). I think the energy cost of manufacturing these is 100-1,000x higher than the old bags and they definitely not getting reused anywhere near that much, the retail price is too low to dissuade purchase.

>I think the energy cost of manufacturing these is 100-1,000x higher

I'd have thought adding a bit more plastic to roll and cut a slightly thicker bag would have a negligible increase in overall impact. You could however easily be right too.

Either way without any reliable source it's fairly meaningless to have an opinion either way.

The problem is that the bags are still too cheap. If you sell them for disposable prices, people will treat them as disposable items.

> Personally I think they should just charge/tax for single use cups

This sends the message that people with money can do whatever they want, environment be dammed. We need to simply ban things that are terrible for future generations, not continue to allow people with money to do it.

It depends on what you use the money for. If you use it to counteract the externalities the transaction creates, the it should work out in the end.

Yes, rich people can do what they want, but at least it doesn't hurt the rest of the people.

> counteract the externalities the transaction creates

Doing so uses up more time and resources that could have been put to better use had the transaction never occurred in the first place.

This is one of the big problems with relying on the price system exclusively as a mechanism of allocation and regulation. It doesn't work well for regulating externalities when people's budget sets vary across orders of magnitude.

Fair point. But this isn't a get out of jail free payment, you're not "offsetting" your cup, just getting charged for it. The social stigma of walking around with a single use coffee cup remains, and may even be amplified. Not to mention that "cafe coffee", at $4-5 / cup (in Australia at least), is already very much a luxury item.

The cup is a product that is currently perceived as gratis / of zero value. Charging for it is intended as a disincentive. In the case of plastic bags (here) it largely worked as such (with prices as low as 10c per bag!) and paved the way for a ban. Though the parallel effect of more resource-intensive bags / cups entering the market / being treated as single use is always a consideration.

But to your broader point, for sure .. bring on a ban.

> The social stigma of walking around with a single use coffee cup remains, and may even be amplified.

I don't think such a stigma exists? As a regular coffee drinker, I've never heard anyone comment upon anothers cup choice or even raise an eyebrow.

We should stigmatise it was the point, I think.

At some point using non-reusable cups and similar things should be akin to smoking in a crowd. And if smoking among other people isn't frowned upon wherever you live, you should start with that first =)

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