I would much rather incentivize non-plastic alternative packaging. Consumers should have better options for metal cans, glass bottles, etc for mainstream goods, as those materials are far more effective targets for recycling. But they're no where near competitive with plastic because the production cost doesn't account for the total lifecycle.
I agree that we must incentivize packaging that's better for the environment. The problem is who gets to define "better". Cloth bags were once thought to be better than plastic for grocery use, but that might not be the case - the cloth has a larger environmental cost to produce (cotton is water-intensive) and has to be used a lot more than one might expect before it surpasses the basic plastic bag. And if the plastic bag is reused a few times, then used as a garbage liner, it's cost is reduced quite a bit.
It's really not easy for a consumer to figure out what's better.
I also use fabric bags, most of which were acquired at no-extra-cost when purchasing other things. Some are quite HD and I expect they'll last a decade or more. But, some are quite flimsy and not something I would purchase on its own.
I suspect that HD hemp bags (or some other blend of material) are the best option, but finding a definitive answer isn't easy. It appears the lighter cotton bags need to be used for two decades to account for the cost of farming the cotton - and many won't last that long before they begin to fail.
I’m approaching 1500 uses per bag by my estimates. Hope to get another 20 years out of them. At least they are fully biodegradable, and don’t produce microbead plastics throughout the environment.
The Danish study assumes that plastic bags are incinerated. How likely is that in reality? I have no idea if my trash is incinerated in bulk, sorted with part incinerated, or 100% dumped in a landfill.
Using cloth bags as an example feels so frustrating to me because banning them seems to so obviously be addressing things other than the embodied carbon represented by the particular container you bring your groceries home with.
A low-quality, low-reuse solution will almost always be the lower carbon solution if you analyze it from the point where someone picks up the product. It also ignores the question of if the embodied carbon in bags is a large factor (I doubt it) and sets aside the question of the impact of generating and disposing of many plastic bags. The latter question is further complicated by comparing how we could, in theory, design an efficient and environmental disposal system v.s. the patchwork reality of the world and the plastic shoals in the oceans.
Well yeah, that's kinda where the problem is. How do we price in all the different kinds of externalities for cotton bags and plastic bags in a way that is consistent and everyone agrees with?
Debating these externalities and how they should be accounted for is exactly the hard problem the parent comment was talking about.
I agree - but that isn't a consumer decision (not a decision made at the time of consumption). A government agency has to determine the cost of the externalities (where the science and economics isn't easy) and then set taxes accordingly (not always politically viable).
Better, the government agency could be removing the reason that the cost can be externalized in the first place.
Admittedly, this is difficult to do for resource extraction or pollution costs. But consider that we can recover the costs of pollution in the ground and (to a lesser extent) the water. The reason we can't internalize the cost of CO2 emissions is because we won't recognize any ownership interest in the air. I'm not sure how to do that either, but I'm hopeful that we could think of something if we'd at least acknowledge this.
Taxes are not the right answer. If you are impacted by a negative externality then you have legitimate standing to sue the source of the externality in civil court (individually or as a group) in accordance with how much the side effects of their actions cost you. If you can't demonstrate that you were actually affected, or the damage is too trivial to be worth taking to court, then for all practical purposes there is no externality and the government has no business getting involved.
Civil courts are not equipped to deal with this issue. At best you will get a lot of very rich lawyers. At worst you will get inaction and a lot of very rich lawyers.
Taxes are a traditional way of pricing in a market externality. It seems appropriate here.
Politicians are not equipped to properly assess the externality incurred in each case and see that the affected party is compensated in accordance with the degree to which they were affected. Taxes paint with a very broad brush, do nothing to compensate the victims, and essentially make the government an accomplice in the externality—once the tax is in place, anything which actually reduced the externality will negatively impact their revenue.
It is impossible to enumerate the individuals affected by carbon output. So who cares about compensation?
The point of taxing carbon is simply to get less carbon. Full stop. Economists (especially the free-market economists!) broadly agree that it will work. Why are we still having this conversation?
> It is impossible to enumerate the individuals affected by carbon output.
There are no non-enumerable sets of individuals. Presumably you meant "everyone is affected by carbon output". That may even be true. But not everyone is affected equally. Some of the effects may even be beneficial for certain individuals, e.g. a warming climate means more productive farmland in far-northern latitudes. Those living on the coasts (or on islands) are more affected by rising sea levels than those living on higher ground well away from the ocean. Some of that is by choice (you knew sea levels were rising when you bought coastal land) and some is not. All of this needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis before proper compensation can be determined.
> So who cares about compensation?
Presumably the people who are most affected by human-created climate change, and thus would qualify for the most compensation.
> The point of taxing carbon is simply to get less carbon. Full stop.
This thread is about carbon emissions as a negative externality, and properly pricing that externality. When one person's actions have a negative side effect on someone else, that should be handled through the courts in a process which ends with the victim being made whole. Taxes don't accomplish that. Even if we assume the tax is correctly calculated to precisely equal the damage to the victim, the tax money doesn't go to the victim; it just ends up in the government's general fund.
If the goal is simply to use taxes as a blunt instrument to implement the government's social policies ("to get less carbon") without regard for externalities then it might "work" in a sense. All else being equal you do generally get less of things that are taxed—though tax proponents tend to downplay this when it comes to taxes on productivity, i.e. income taxes. On the other hand, carbon taxes give the government an incentive to maintain carbon emissions as an ongoing revenue stream, so it could have the opposite effect over time. (Any proposal with the intended or expected effect of reducing carbon emissions would need to somehow find a way to replace that part of the tax revenue.)
In theory, that works. In practice, I can't afford enough lawyers to take on Big Business. I'm also not sure how I prove damages for something like climate change. But yet climate change is real. And by the time I have obvious damages, it will be too late.
If you're part of a class which is demonstrably harmed in aggregate by climate change (for example, owners of coastal property), you could hire lawyers as a class to sue those responsible. Probably even on a contingency basis.
Most people are not demonstrably harmed by climate change, and thus would have no standing to sue. Which is as it should be. If you can't prove that emitting CO2 is actually harmful, what justification do you have for imposing the proposed carbon tax? Other than raising general tax revenues, that is—but the proponents of carbon taxes claim that it's for the environment, not to cover a shortfall in the budget.
One way to incentivize recyclable packaging would be to make it illegal for companies to put a symbol on their non-recyclable plastic packaging that 98% of consumers associate with recycling.
Further - I don't understand why we don't just have mandated bottle/jar form factors.
We broke the fucking loop by claiming that people could just throw plastic containers away and "somewhere, somehow (over the rainbow!!!) people will recycle them into new goods". That story is bullshit - even for most plastics that can actually be recycled.
I want legislation that lays out a set of standardized form factors that are as re-usable as possible (NOT RECYCLABLE - Literally washable and reusable), and if companies use those - great! No extra taxes for you.
Want to use your own custom packaging? Fine, but you pay for the whole fucking product lifecycle up front, before the customer ever touches it: Collection, Cleaning, Recycling/Disposal, Reprocessing, Redistribution. The EU estimates those costs for plastic at about 800 EUR ($950) a ton.
Denmark used to have a system for reusing glass beer bottles. There was one standardized size that all the breweries used, and they were reused.
At some point in the last decade or so, the system was changed so now the glass gets recycled instead. The bottles are thinner now (lighter to transport, less material used) and allegedly it works out to less impact, based on some model.
(Though I've also heard it was mainly because breweries wanted to be free to decide the look of their bottles, for branding reasons, and something about EU harmonization to make it possible to sell imported beers.)
>I want legislation that lays out a set of standardized form factors that are as re-usable as possible (NOT RECYCLABLE - Literally washable and reusable), and if companies use those - great! No extra taxes for you.
Is that seriously the impediment to plastic container reusability, that they're not standardized? People don't reuse plastic containers because there aren't that many uses for them around the house.
My wife and I went through a period of trying to maximally reuse otherwise disposable packaging we had around the house, and we quickly discovered two facts:
1. There's surprisingly many things you can use disposable containers for around the house.
2. Even if you go out of your way to find more uses for the waste, in a month or two you'll just run out of applications.
The problem of consumer waste is that it's a continuous flow of trash. At-home reuse is not a sink, it's a buffer - it fills up quickly, so it doesn't alter the overall dynamic of the system.
Any waste reuse scheme needs to recirculate it on the market - new products need to be put in old packaging.
I read @horsawlarway's comment as "reusable for the original use" as in how the US used to have glass soda (soft drink) bottles that were collected at stores, returned to the bottler, who would wash them out, refill them with new soda, and put them back out on store shelves or in vending machines.
The return of the empty bottles to the stores was incentivized via a ten cent per bottle "deposit" one made upon purchase, which one received back when one returned the bottle to a store that collected them. This was the mid 1970's as well, so that ten cent deposit would be about 45 cents per bottle today.
I wouldn't be surprised if the environmental impact of glass bottle maintenance, storage, replenishment-production, ends up being higher than the impact of single-use plastic bottles
Bottle deposits are still in force around the world. For instance in parts of the EU. They provide the most benefit where they support re-use (glass bottles) but are also used for recyclable PET bottles.
Glass bottles cost a lot to transport, occupy a lot of space, must be washed and sterilised. PET bottles are crushed in the machine that you return them to so they occupy less space and are much lighter. Here in Norway where most drinks containers have a deposit we have almost completely switched to PET bottles and aluminium cans for beer and soft drinks on the grounds that recycling PET bottles and aluminium cans is cheaper than reusing glass ones.
I'm canning a lot of vegetables and fruits. I reuse jars and lids from store-bought products like mustard or mayonnaise. The lids aren't interchangeable. In fact, there's a huge variety in the lids' shape, size, and thickness. It's especially frustrating when those custom lids lose the sealing and grip over time or they rust. Hunting an exact replacement is often impossible, so you can't reuse this specific jar anymore.
If you're pickling things and are storing them long-term, you absolutely should not re-use jars and lids from store-bought products. Canning lids are not re-usable, and you're risking your life by doing so. Use products intended for home canning, and use a new lid every single time!
> The EU estimates those costs for plastic at about 800 EUR ($950) a ton.
This sounds surprisingly little. In this range, making companies paid up front will have negligible impact on their behavior. Rounding up to $1000 / ton of plastic, that'll come out as few cents for most products. E.g. quick Googling suggests that an empty 2L bottle of Coca Cola weighs about 50 grams, making such tax translate to $0.05 extra cost to company/consumer. That's negligible, and well within the range of the usual business shenanigans companies do with prices.
Isn't part of the problem though that recycling facilities vary greatly in capability or breadth in the things they can manage, and are necessarily regional? Couple that with the fact that some facilities turn functionality on or off depending on market prices at any given time (esp. with say single use plastic grocery bags).
I mean, a #n plastic may be easily recycled with your curbside pickup, but be a processing issue with mine. I don't know how that can be handled better.
> Products would be considered recyclable if CalRecycle, the state’s recycling department, determines they have a viable end market and meet certain design criteria, including not using toxic chemicals.
I think that's reasonable. If a particular material is viable for recycling but many facilities can't handle it, CalRecycle can work with them to resolve the issue. They'll probably update the standard every few years, so producers don't need to worry about the rules changing every week as market prices fluctuate.
It's certainly better than allowing companies to slap a recycling symbol on any kind of plastic just because the technology to recycle it exists somewhere in the world.
The rest are regional and don't help much from everything I've seen about the topic.
I want glass, paper, and cardboard packaging to make a comeback. We shouldn't be using space age high performance single use materials for making sure the SD card is contained in 100x the mass of plastic it is itself made of.
It's insulting, honestly, that they feel it's worth spending their money to make me throw away trash that didn't need to exist.
Where I am you can technically recycle 1, 2, 4, and 5 but 4 (grocery bags) sucks and 5 is nearly prohibitively expensive. So really you can recycle 1 and 2 and feel good about pretending that the 4 and 5 will be recycled. Meanwhile no one teaches the places that do takeout that they can just use different containers that cost the same or less but are recyclable. And no one teaches them that getting "compostable plastic" is trash here and almost everywhere.
I favor letting them do whatever they want, and then charging them whatever it costs to recycle, pick up, and/or safely dispose of the packages.
No opportunity to blame the consumer or play games.
Make the "this is not recyclable" message small and fuzzy and green next to a planet giving the thumbs up? I dont care, because you'll be getting the bill for every senior citizen you confuse.
Why glass? Glass is quite recyclable but requires lots of energy to recycle. As soda bottles and milk bottles they might last 20 uses. Glass is also much heavier requiring more energy to transport.
In every part of Canada I've lived in there has been a well developed reuse system. In Ontario, for example, a beer bottle is used around 100 times on average. Reuse should be way better integrated into our systems. If I could bring a resuable bag back to any supermarket to get the $1 fee back, it would be so much easier to justify buying reusable bags that really last a long time. The trouble is I never remember to bring it with me in the morning before work and I grocery shop on my way back home.
Oh, ok thanks for updating my view. I clearly remember hearing it was 99% but must be either misremembering or the original source was wrong. I'd still rather have re-use via glass or recycling via aluminum than plastic.
My family stores the bags in the trunk of our car. They are always available for random shopping trips. Public transportation would make reusable bags much more inconvenient for our family.
Beer bottles are typically only reused if you say, bring them to The Beer Store or something similar.
If you toss them in your municipal bin like me, my understanding is they basically just smash them and use the glass bits in other products like asphalt as it's just not worth the energy cost to actually recycle it.
Aluminum cans are probably a better bet for recycling if you're just using the municipal bins. They're profitable enough that people routinely come steal the cans from my bins.
But if the bottles, or even a subset of them, were standardized, it would be possible to have some bottle specific re-use (not recycle) programs. OP was I think giving an example of one that works. Perhaps it would be possible to extend it. I can understand there are some product specific's that limit this in some cases, but if I drink beer and topo chico and a few other similar drinks, it seems unlikely they couldn't all use the same bottle.
A lot of beer bottles conform to an industry standard (the ones with paper labels where anyone can slap their own label) and get reused. However, the reuse frequency is from 15 to 20 times before they begin to fail inspection tests and have to be taken out of circulation (and recycled or dumped). Recycling that glass is expensive. The big advantage of glass from a consumer pov is that its inert and does not react with contents.
I keep a couple in every bag I use regularly (gym bag, work bag, briefcase, etc) so I'm never without if I decide to stop by the store on the way home. That way you don't have to proactively remember to bring it!
You are not wrong, but in some countries they collect, wash, and and reuse glass (and even special kinds of plastic) bottles. According to my parents that used to be standard practice in the United States. Someone should do the math first obviously but it seems like a great idea to me. If bottling is done locally you aren’t transporting the bottles long distance, and quite significantly in my mind glass is inert so if it does get into the environment, it isn’t leaching microplastics into the environment for the next thousand years.
>According to my parents that used to be standard practice in the United States.
You're making me feel old. I used to sort bottles as a kid.
Soft drinks are just another example of gigantism in corporate life, economy of scale uber alles. There was a time when practically every small town had one or more bottling plants, the owners were pillars of the community sponsoring softball teams and the like. Delivery trucks typically had shelving rather than bays.
Following that there was a huge spate of consolidation. Small distributors/bottlers had their franchises taken away, canning became owned by the mothership and absolutely huge. The more centralized the more of a pain it becomes to sort/return/clean bottles.
I suppose it's like the history of car dealerships as they become fewer and larger. For that matter, a significant (most?) percentage of the US used to be self-employed instead of wage slaves.
More likely retail- in my town the bookstore, stationary store, newsstand, hardware stores, etc. were all family owned until the big box stores opened up two towns over.
When I was a kid the only businesses I can remember being non-locally owned were a Safeway and branches of two state-wide banks. This is in a town of 20k or so (at the time). There were small local manufacturing firms, 100% of restaurants were local (no chains), nearly all grocery stores were family owned, you could still make a living as a rancher.
Obviously there were franchises (gas stations, a small Sears store mostly for catalog ordering) but not very many.
And local druggists whose pharmacies also provided other services. It's not a particularly American thing, this transformation is everywhere --that does not imply it's good for everyone.
Finland has that system for glass bottles. Plastic bottles also are in system but those are shredded and aluminium is crushed. Used to be that they were washed and re-used, but I think there were some calculations that it was worse than single use... Or might have been some EU thing...
I’ve always wondered about colocating manufacturing near cheap power sources. Is this actually possible? Isn’t the power generated already being used? If it is possible, why doesn’t every manufacturing plant just do this to reduce a huge input cost?
Pretty sure aluminum extraction plants do this. As well as Bitcoin miners. ;-)
Recently ... where was I, Eugene, Oregon? There was a shuttered Coca Cola bottling plant. I remember a huge one in Kansas City as well. Maybe someone with expertise can weigh in — but it seems like we used to, as an example, bottle things a lot more locally. It meant factory jobs in the area, transportation (of Coke) was shorter since there was probably a bottling plant in your state (or a neighboring one).
Most major metro areas in the US continue to have soft drink bottling plants (though they're using plastic bottles and aluminum cans these days), since transporting huge volumes of water is more expensive than smaller amounts of flavoring and coloring. Eugene OR (pop ~175K) may be slightly too small for that to be practical, but here in Portland I bike to work past two active bottling plants.
Energy transfer losses are pretty marginal around 2%. Compared to labour availability, shipping resources and products; and land, it is not so big deal. Unless it's very energy intensive industry.
While we're at it, can we get rid of cloth packaging that isn't explicitly made to be reused? Like how Tom's come in a box and a cloth bag inside of that box! It's so resource intensive; it's like the definition of virtue signalling.
Virtue signaling is when an entity does something expressly to show they support a cause or extol a virtue, without actually helping.
Disposable cloth packaging is a great example of this. Plastic production needs to be reduced for a large number of reasons, but cloth production takes an exceptional amount of energy and resources to produce while not generally being reusable or recyclable, and the extra durability and/or protection of cloth is almost never needed.
> But they're no where near competitive with plastic because the production cost doesn't account for the total lifecycle.
I don't know what you mean by this.
If you bottle stuff into PET bottles (the usual stuff, being shredded after one use), then you have to buy one new PET bottle for each bottle you produce.
If you bottle stuff into reusable glass bottles (98+ % returned intact, cleaned and reused), then you mostly don't buy new bottles, just replacements for bottles falling out of the cycle (reuse limit reached, not returned, broken).
Why and by what mechanism would the price of a single new glass bottle account for the lifecycle of the bottle? It just doesn't make sense to me.
I think what the parent comment meant was that for the environmental impact of producing and transporting a glass bottle (glassware are heavy), one can produce and transport many PET bottles. The ratio can be high enough to the point where producing a glass bottle is more environmental impactful if they are not reused enough.
I think this is the goal of Maine’s new recycling law (briefly mentioned in the article) where manufacturers are responsible for the cost of recycling. Although I’m not sure Maine’s law really allocates the full social cost of plastics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/maine-bec...
