Even if that random idiot dumps their recycling, it is anything but useless.
If you didn't recycle, that would be at least 2 idiots dumping their recycling.
Sorry for being pedantic, but it troubles me when people worry they aren't making a difference because some other random idiot doesn't participate.
This seems like something which could be pretty easily mitigated against by citizens following up with their local cities to verify that things are actually ending up at recycling plants. I'd be furious, considering what I pay for these services if I were to find out they aren't actually recycling. I guess I'll have to look into my local situation. This is a frustrating realization.
It's becoming exhausting that it seems like more and more we can't trust companies to do what they imply.
Guess who will be the lowest bidder?
Even if there is some actual recycling and the trash can be sold for a positive value, chances are that someone who only picks the easiest valuables and then illegally dumps the rest will be able to outbid a more responsible competitor. It's just the natural outcome of a disposal market and it is incredibly difficult to regulate away from that outcome.
Unfortunately yes. Here's the article I was thinking about.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-recycling-is-in-chaos...
If you look for "recycling crisis" or similar on Google News you'll find many more. I kind of knew that recycling wasn't as eco-efficient as it should be, but I had no idea just how bad it has been and it's getting worse. :(
The phrasing is telling. "China no longer accepting", "communities are facing", "forcing them".
...no, it would go in the garbage and also not a river.
According to the study by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research [1], 90% of ocean waste comes from 10 rivers - 8 in Asia and 2 in Africa. I'm not sure if what we do in the U.S. and Europe will have much impact on the oceans.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
It's not like all of that plastic is just domestic consumption. Right? We just exported our negative externalities. We don't really have a moral high-ground here. Even if you are a Jedi master.
Maximizing yield via regulation is usually the ECON101 lesson that accompanies discussions about the tragedy of the commons.
i.e. it's part of the commons. It has often been used as an example of such, because despoiling a resource still reduces supply just like direct depletion does.
> the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner
That is exactly what TotC is about. Even if one could split hairs about what's TotC vs. some other kind of externality, the fact remains that the dynamics are the same. In light of your own last sentence, do you disagree with GP's point that regulation is the necessary answer?
Hmm, so if we want to reduce human pollution of the oceans... we just need to colonize the oceans!
Pollution is directly analogous to the standard Tragedy of the Commons scenario of a shared pasture, where the pasture equates to the environment, the cows are industry, and grazing the cows in the common pasture equates to industry producing pollution.
That's your problem right there. You're treating the cows as somehow separate from the environment. For this example, let's consider the pasture as an island so that you have nowhere else to go. The actual externality of cows eating grass is poop, which fertilizes the soil to some degree but can poison it in excess. Overgrazing is not an externality as such; it's depletion, and then all your cows die and so do you. Maybe you get to eat a few of the cows while you wait for more grass to grow but after they're gone you won't be able to live on the grass. The benefits of temporarily having more cows than you can sustainably graze is an illusion, because you can't eat them all as soon as the grass runs out. You too are part of the ecosystem.
(Ok, in the real world you have other land available, trade, and so on. But that just distributes the problem over a large population and area, postponing the point where carrying capacity becomes an issue. And more often than not, profits are retained by one party while pollution is dumped on another whose suffering the profiteer has no desire to alleviate. In this example that particular cheat code is not operational.)
There are two reasons this might happen: external forcing of the ecosystem (drought, being hit by a meteor etc.), or letting your herd expand faster than the pasture can grow new grass, which is essentially borrowing time from the future and dying when you've done so. The uncertain risk of external forcing inclines us to hedge against its possibility by accumulating excess, but since the known and increasing risk of feedback can't be directly compared with the uncertain external risk people tend to 'rationalize it' by making irrational appeals to possibility rather than probability. The most obvious example of this today is people who object to any and all environmental regulation by dismissing predictions of environmental problems as too vague while simultaneously insisting that mitigating them will definitely lead to economic catastrophe, even though weather and climate modeling is considerably more rigorous than economic modeling and the extremely harsh and obvious value and life destruction of environmental disasters.
More pollution is necessarily worse. You can hedge it in the short term, but in the long term you mitigate it or you die - and while in the long run, we are all dead, dying faster than you need to is maladaptive. Running the system too fast increases entropy and that is a one-way ticket.
This is nothing that can be solved with personal initiative and responsibility; it requires international regulation and enforcement. There’s no other way