Yes. I think the incentives to have a sustainable/ethical design in the context of reducing waste or recycling waste would be a good incentive for products/service/companies like this. Could there be a subsidy for companies that take the time to manage their products/design/supply-chain to combat wastefulness/negative externalities of using the product/service?
For example, Apple appears to be taking the environmental impact of their business seriously:
Then: nix the tax for any corporation willing to take back their own wasteful byproducts at their own cost and recycle them.
Extreme? Oh yes, but also a great way to align a corporations incentives, and anything else is most likely a half measure that makes the problem worse by preventing an effective measure from being put in place.
In general, we should stop making waste just for the sake of appearing more sophisticated. Keurig has very successfully targeted the same people who insist on bottled water, even though tap water is higher quality and cheaper.
I don't know what's wrong with the basic human wiring, but we really seem to have a glitch that makes us equate excessive consumption with higher socioeconomic class. See also: giant SUVs, etc, etc.
You can't ban stuff because bans would be full of loopholes for "necessary" usage.
You can't just appeal to people's better nature because humans are humans.
You must live in the alternate universe where everyone litters.
No, some people just don't litter. Whole cities where people don't litter! Sometimes, there is a clear protagonist and antagonist.
As an aside: an* effective means of keeping that cup out of the ocean is also to buy all the cups and not use them. Pretty much the exact OPPOSITE of a "pigouvian tax." Isn't that crazy?
What if we bought all the oil and didn't burn it? What if we buy all the land it's under? Or more realistically, what if I bought carbon credits in cap and trade and didn't use them?
Greg Mankiw has doomed a generation to inside-the-box policy with his inane textbook.
In Seattle we've banned the cheap plastic bags that blow around and get stuck in trees. There are many, many fewer tree-stuck-plastic-bag-ghosts to be seen around now. We've also put a mandatory 5c fee (not a tax, sadly) on paper bags; there are many, many more people bringing reusable bags to the supermarket.
(Ignores, of course, whether these reusable bags are better for the environment holistically -- having lots of yuppies buying synthetic shopping bags made in China and shipped to Amazon DCs, then having them individually shipped out in Prime boxes, etc. before being used is probably worse than just having pulp grown in America made into bags trucked en masse to the grocery and generally recycled or composted.)
Regarding carbon credits -- soon that will be not only feasible but tokenized and sub-divisible. See http://sparkchange.io/
eg if k-cups cost 2c to produce in plastic, and tax raises that cost to 5c, and margins were at 4c so now 1c, then it makes sense to start looking at alternative materials/strategies that weren't previously cost-effective.
At the same time, auto using a good deal of plastic per car, but much higher margins, and much less plastic use across the total market, might have their costs raised by $200 in total per car by the same tax; but if they had a $5k margin now dropped to $4.8k, they probably don't need to change much (they're still affected, but not nearly as bad).
The problem with plastic is that its cheap, so it can easily fit in disposable markets, but we really don't want it there, and disposable markets tend to have razor-thin margins. Ofc the strategy I just described might not actually affect K-cups: K-cups are really the only thing I can think of where plastic got added to make it a luxury product, rather than removed (cars otoh are luxury despite the plastic). And being a luxury product, it's probably got decent margins and can eat small tax increases.
But you can probably get 90% of the way there with minor taxes. And ofc you'll still have necessary usage for certain things (lets say, emergency shelters), but you can avoid adding loopholes to plastic by lowering less tax-burdens on other aspects of the target industry, which might be less viable/harmful to abuse.
Buy a pack of bottled water or disposable cups and you just avoided an entire workload of maintaining, tracking and washing a bunch of cups. Out and about and don't want to maintain your own personal water bottle, and don't want flavored water? You buy bottled water!
Same with k-cups. You don't have to maintain a grinder and bean bags, you don't have to wait for the drip coffee machine to finally finish, you don't need to boil water for crappy instant coffee with sediment, you don't have to clean any of these machines either. You just fill the machine with water and clean your mug and maybe descale the thing a couple of times a year.
Since the turtle doesn’t care about the tax anyway, I’m willing to go the extra mile and simply ban single use polymer products altogether, and we’ll go back to however we handled things prior to their introduction into the marketplace.
Right, and the sea life dying from warming and acidification of the oceans doesn't really care that the carbon emissions had an additional tax on it....
The reason by the way I’m suggesting a tax on production is because a product isn’t necessarily a sale: the physical waste still exists even if it just sits in a warehouse before being disposed of.
(That's not actually me - I use a Rancilio Silvia, buy my beans in a brown paper bag and dig my coffee pucks into our vege garden).
1) as the tax will be broad. What if I invented a biodegradable capsule that decomposes after 6 months? No company will buy this invention. Because it will still be taxed.
2) company can make their process even cheaper than the tax imposed. Ie contents of two capsules is now one big capsule. Or use cheaper unhealither material.
What you need is for companies to take back their own waste.
Then increase cost of disposing of waste with more funds towards environment agencies. It would be amazing to see landfill bins on streets to be a relic of the past.
> with no incentive for corporations to make environmentally friendly products.
Competition is the incentive. As is profitability. A tax on bad business practice makes good business practices a better option.
> 1) as the tax will be broad. What if I invented a biodegradable capsule that decomposes after 6 months? No company will buy this invention. Because it will still be taxed.
Tax as defined by GP will not cover your invention.
> 2) company can make their process even cheaper than the tax imposed. Ie contents of two capsules is now one big capsule. Or use cheaper unhealither material.
If they could do that easily, they'd already have made it so. It is possible that a company would have no other option than doubling down on the bad practice, but they'd still be paying full cost for negative externalities - money the society could use to mitigate them. But the more likely outcome is that a company will switch to a method that's suddenly more profitable because of being untaxed.
At the very least, the tax would give companies a reason to look for a better way.
Re: Gp point. How do you think the government can determine wasteful disposables?
There's cars that only last 5 years instead of 40+. (Apparently replacing metal with plastic cut costs but increases maintenance costs). Is a car lasting 5 years, a wasteful disposable? What if it's still functional but needs replacing with more plastic? At 10 cent a car, why would this discourage car companies from 1 year car use?
What i see is that the gov will need a big agency to determine which disposable is wasteful (non biodegradable/recycable?) vs those that are not. Either that or the agency approve exceptions which may not be cheap either?
My proposal means the costs of environmentally friendly products are reflected in the price instead of a tax. By making companies take back waste.
A car with plastic will cost a lot to dispose of, just like a lot of plastic products. Now imagine if all products were replaced with aluminium and glass. Less disposable costs.
Edit: in economic terms. The waste is an externalised cost by companies. My proposal privatises it.
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I think Apple is doing "greenwashing". If they were serious they would make their devices repairable and upgradeable.
I mean, let's figure you have two possibilities:
1 You have to take it to Apple and have it replaced. In which case Apple will try to salvage (recycle) whatever they can.
2 You buy a new sub-component, take the old sub-component out, and salvage (recycle) the old sub-component yourself.
In all honesty, what is the percentage of people who would actually complete the salvage (recycle) step of option 2? I think it's, at least reasonable, to suspect that the percentage is not terribly high.
I don't think so. While they have indeed closed down self-repairs and upgrades, and stop supporting some models after 5-6 years:
a) Their products keep their resale value higher. That's the opposite of "planned obsolescence"
b) They update iPhones/iPads for as many iOS releases as they can, whereas Android phones have historically been (and still predominantly are) left off with no updates post-sale (statistics verify this)
c) Their stuff might not be user operable but can be upgraded at their stores and is also regularly refurbished (and it happens by the hundreds of millions too)
d) They also have recycling programs in place
That said, easier repair and upgrades would indeed be more environment friendly. Even better, less models, as opposed to a new model a year and having people chase it.
A heavy tax on buying gadgetry (proportional not to the value of the product, but to one's income) would help. But of course the whole economy is based on "more more more, externalities be damned".
Apple is serious in a way no other brand I know of is about the recyclability of their products. https://www.apple.com/environment/
I suspect the batteries and serviceability are a drop in the bucket when done directly by the consumer. Apple is very serious about making goods that last and that hold their value when refurbished.
What is new is the polarization over technology brands and people using arguments on things they pretty much know nothing about and have no experience with.
I've survived the apple gigahertz gap, countless generations of console wars, seen usenet flamewars last for weeks, and any number of minor brand skirmishes & salvos. Polarization over tech brands is nothing new. "War never changes" [0]
The perspective inside for the rank and file was dominated by concern about hackers and stolen iPhones for the touchid security. Apple was trying to get people to trust their medical records and finances to the device (a massive market opportunity) and so took an extremely paranoid approach to how replaceable the hardware was, to prevent trivial exploits. The repairability market was small peanuts compared to that, and I genuinely believe that no one wanted iPhones to be harder to service vs other phones.
You've contradicted yourself a bit here. You said that Apple was willing to forgo repairability in order to chase a new market. So, while making the devices hard to repair wasn't the primary goal, it certainly was something they wanted to accomplish in order to service a goal that was more appealing to them -- so they did want the devices to be harder to service.
Apple doesn't really win or lose much with the home repair market, and as mad as some people get over that, the numbers aren't lying.
Yes, that was what I understood. What I'm saying is that it's hard to assert that "no one wanted iPhones to be harder to service" when they've intentionally made the decision to make iPhones harder to service. Yes, making them harder to service was not the primary goal, but they chose to do it in order to achieve a different goal -- therefore they wanted iPhones to be harder to service.
Unfortunately this hasn’t resulted in a repairable iphone. Yet again corporate incentives and lack of moral ownership work against consumer interests.
As a side note it's baffling tome that a firm like Apple would go all in on touch ID given the numerous demonstrations in movies and TV of how that would likely be abused, many of which have made the jump from fiction to reality.
Can't agree with that. Being able to get into anything with a Philips screwdriver and then think through what I found inside was how I developed the hacker mentality way back in the 70s/80s, back when a pocket calculator had lots of discrete components and one chip.
Repairability alone won't solve an environmental crisis, and of course as technology advances integration makes many repairs impossible, so bad luck if your SD card gets damaged. But being able to open things up is still valuable. A year or two back I called out a synthesizer manufacturer who was misrepresenting the technical capabilities of their expensive but software-incomplete product. If I hadn't developed the experience and confidence to find my way around unfamiliar circuit boards and how to read component markings I wouldn't have been able to do that.
In Apple's case; I don't think malice is why they do what they do, it's probably a byproduct of a much simpler reason. As posted above, security might be one. If a device is harder to take apart, it's also harder to tamper with. I personally think that this would only hold up to some degree as an attacker with enough resources could get in anyway, but perhaps the required resources are are a high enough level that common attacks are less feasible.
Another thing that is a way bigger issue (in my hacker mindset) is when SMT/SMD became common, just like VLSI. You suddenly can no longer easily see how a circuit works, and repairing a few failed components on a PCB gets much harder for most people. Then again, the cost (in time or paid time) is also no longer reasonably to have someone else do it. Replacing hardware and the benefits that can come with that are often a better deal than a repair.
It was the automotive industry that invented and perfected it, not Apple.
But is it still "many times" when you factor in the costs of manufacturing it (all the way to marginal costs of mining the materials) and transporting it to the stores?
I really wish products were evaluated in terms of total costs; the shop price gives near zero information about the sustainability impact of a product.
I know nothing about this and have no strong opinions about it one way or the other, but that phrasing is hilarious.
> The Phoebus cartel created a notable landmark in the history of the global economy because it engaged in large-scale planned obsolescence to generate repeated sales and maximize profit.
> The cartel conveniently lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours) and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.
Also, my personal experience with Apple stuff is that it lasts quite long; for example, I used my last Macbook Pro for around 6 years, and even then it was still working just fine, I just wanted TouchID when I upgraded it. On the other hand, my dad, on Asus/Lenovo/Dell machines, has replaced his laptop 3 times in the same period.
Not to mention all the other people talking about just how small a slice of consumers actually do properly salvage and repair their stuff. I'd assume a tiny, tiny percent of sophisticated consumers actually do, while the vast majority don't go to much lengths to repair or properly dispose of their electronics.
I like repairability for myself because I am capable of DIY fixing things. But I don't assume that companies that do it do so because they're somehow more environmentally conscious, when probably plenty of other practices they do are extremely environmentally destructive.
[1] https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/63-percent-of-all-iphon...
Isn't that functionally what a "carbon tax" is? Seems like the obvious solution we (speaking from the U.S.) should have implemented decades ago. There are other types of waste, but plastic seems like the most problematic.
Or, that means you could put them into ten 76x76x76 foot cubes, with really inefficient cubic packing density, with one two-inch cube per K-cup. And that volume is mostly empty air, not plastic.
Your comment would be ok without the first paragraph (but note the guideline about allcaps).
The keyword is "appears" , having to replace half of a laptop because a key is broken is not environmental friendly even if you could 99% recycle the materials since you consumed ton of energy and created CO2 producing and then recycling those working parts.
The nearly-zero cost to throwing something away, while good for cleanliness of public spaces, seems to enable this. It has been unsettling to watch people close to me get upset, indignant, offended that a particular trash item would not just disappear. Entitlement.
K-cups are decidedly bad, because they waste plastics which are non-renewable. Dusters could be made, today, using only renewable resources.
If the problem is waste, that's something for the government to sort out.
Yes, let's put a $10 tax on each. But then you would probably complain about overregulation.
About this convenience thing, people are just getting lazier and lazier and then come up with rationalisations. Keeping a clean moka pot is painless, it also makes a cheap, really nice and eco-friendly coffee.
It's absurd to produce 10000% more thrash because you just don't want to wet your hands.
That's one way it could be the worst invention of the last few decades.
Do you mean that they need to manage it via regulations? Or deal with the externalities of all that waste? Because in the latter, government = us.
Everybody loves plastic bags but they are taking them away from us. K-Cups could (should?) have a similar fate.
The worst part is that K-Cups solve a non-existent problem. Their advantages over your normal office percolator is that it takes less work, nobody has to make it, they don't collect rancid coffee oils that nobody bothers to clean out, and the beans are marginally better than the garbage most offices are buying. You can also stock a variety of flavors without having to commit your entire office to drinking a pot of artificial cinnamon flavoring.
But you could solve all of those by just using instant coffee and a water boiler! Just about every other country in the world has figured out how to make decent enough instant coffee, especially in Asia. But for some reason, America is still stuck with Folgers crystals.
That's actually where I'd start if you want to have an impact via guerrilla marketing. Convince your office to switch over to something like Sudden coffee or even the Starbucks Via packs. No, it's not as good as your fancy third-wave coffee spot around the corner or even just a regular Starbucks. But it can be head and shoulders above anything a Keurig will give you.
One of the tent pole ideas of capitalism is that people are rational actors/consumers. They aren't.
Capitalism is the ideal system for encouraging and refining this process, it's the "bottled water" strategy.
Business-wise they are genius though. Take something and make it ten times as expensive.