You think illegal fishermen in the Philippines (where the bulk of the waste in the whale originated according to the article) really care you’ve outlawed plastic fishing nets?

Your solution needs to be extremely incentivized and also easy to enforce in those places of the world. “Banning” something will have a laughable impact and only affect people who never created the waste in the first place.

What you could do is subsidize biodegradable fishing nets so that they're cheaper than plastic ones. Then everyone everywhere stops using plastic ones because the only reason they were used to begin with was that they're cheaper.

That also requires the government rather than industry to pay the cost of its regulations, and explicitly choose how to raise the money rather than implicitly taxing fishermen (and fish) without ever evaluating whether that is the optimal funding source.

Why would the fishermen not be the optimal finding source? Basically the premise here is that their use of plastic nets is already externalizing a cost onto society. Forcing them to pay for nets that cause less externalities just means we're moving the cost away from all of society and back to those who are benefitting from it.

You're assuming that they're the ones benefiting from it.

Suppose they use plastic nets and that makes fishing less expensive, but they all do that and it's a commodity market so they don't get to keep any of that money, it just means that it reduces the price of fish.

Now we need them to use more expensive nets. If we put the cost of them on the fisherman, it raises the price of fish, a healthier source of protein than many of the alternatives (e.g. red meat), and raises the price of food in general. Not super great as an outcome.

If we put the cost of them on coal companies, it raises the price of coal. Coal has nothing to do with fishing net, but we're actually trying to discourage coal, so since taxing coal burning is better than taxing fish eating, that may be a better choice.

I'm from that part of the world and laws here are more like "recommendations". It rarely gets enforced until there's a complaint. And the authorities are more likely to be focusing on factories dumping cyanide in a river or bauxite strip mining, rather than plastic nets.

The other side of it is that people are extremely poor. Possibly negative net value, lots of debts and no other way to pay next months bills. These people are going to use whatever it takes to live, and authorities who try to enforce it will look like villains.

Well you could ban at the manufacturing level, and ideally use political pressure to get other countries on board. It wouldn't be a %100 fix, but seems like it would be a simple step in the right direction.

Once their nets break and no new plastic nets are being produced then yeah, I think they’ll care.