
Malaysia to send up to 100 tonnes of plastic waste back to Australia - i_feel_great
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/29/malaysia-to-send-up-to-100-tonnes-of-plastic-waste-back-to-australia
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pizzabearman
Recycling has become such a lazy way of dealing with a bit more convenience.
Single use plastics and plastic packaging should be banned or at least be
taxed accordingly for subsequent processing.

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vidarh
> Recycling has become such a lazy way of dealing with a bit more convenience.

It's not necessarily that simple. With glass bottle reuse vs. plastic
recycling, for example, it's not necessarily clear which ends up being most
efficient. The glass containers can be reused, but not that many times on
average, and it takes sufficiently more energy to produce one vs. the energy
required to recycle a plastic bottle.

> Single use plastics and plastic packaging should be banned or at least be
> taxed accordingly for subsequent processing.

I'd go further and say we ought to tax all packaging based on the cost of
cleanup, be that reuse, recycling, or other measures.

As an example of a measure that works reasonably well (but where I think the
rates still ought to rise further to reflect the environmental costs in full)
is bottle return schemes like the one in Norway that starts by adding a tax to
drinks containers, and then adds in an incentive to recycle by deducting from
the tax based on the proportion of containers recycled via approved schemes.

It doesn't go far enough in encouraging _less_ packaging, and that specific
scheme only covers drinks containers, but the overall principle of taxing
based on an assumption that the packaging will not be treated properly and
that we need to penalize that, and then reducing the tax bill if you can prove
otherwise, is good.

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mtgx
Same with re-usable bags. I read somewhere that you need to use it 37 times to
make the switch from single-use plastic bags worth it. Either way, I prefer
reusable bags.

~~~
LeonM
I live in the Netherlands, the government here passed a law in 2016 that
prohibits shops from giving out free plastic bags (the are required to charge
a minimal of 25 cents for a bag).

In my opinion it works tremendously well. It took about a month for people to
get used to the idea, but now you see most people bring their own reusable
bags. As far as I can tell the amount of waste plastic bags on the street has
reduced significantly since them.

An interesting observation was that the shopkeepers had more issues with this
law than the consumers. For the first couple of months many had some lame sign
saying something like 'we are very sorry that our stupid government forced us
to charge you for this bag'. Some even offered 25 cents discount on their
product if you took a bag with your purchase. Luckily it is now generally
accepted by both the merchants and the consumers.

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jddj
Outsourcing recycling to developing nations seems like such an ethical
minefield. It's a promising sign that Malaysia and the Philippines are putting
their foot down and rejecting anything which isn't suitable or has been
contaminated.

If the companies responsible feel the pushback it may help to close the
feedback loop somewhat between western consumers and the consequences of their
consumption.

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cosmodisk
Remember watching a documentary about UK's landfills.The older ones,that are
no longer in use, are often not even mapped property,so even the government
struggles to pin point where all the stuff was dumped half a century ago.What
was even more interesting is how much slower things degrade as opposed to the
official guidelines. Decommissioned landfills are often covered with a layer
of soil,which essentially deprives it from oxygen and slows down the
process.They dug up some newspapers that were 30 or more years old and still
fully legible.

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merricksb
Discussed earlier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20030065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20030065)

