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.
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.