Prices may increase but imagine how much more competitive American or European manufacturing could be if the cheapest materials (and incidentally most environmentally harmful) were taxed appropriately.

There’s a cycle of waste where cheap goods break but its okay because its cheap. Instead we could be making things that last.

Building products that last as long as possible is a sure fire way to destroy your market.

You can't both build things that can be infinitely fixable and sell a steady stream of them.

This is only true if you hold a monopoly on the market.

Durability is a competitive advantage that businesses and individuals will often clamor for. It’s not easy to replicate

And yet no one is building durable products.

There’s plenty of manufacturing devoted to quality, but often are outcompeted by outsourced manufacturing using questionable labor and lacking environmental safeguards.

Hence why I advocate for taxing plastics

>There’s plenty of manufacturing devoted to quality

Name one.

Cars

Carhart pants.

Higher end TVs (so, Sony, LG, Samsung)

iPhones last something like 7-8 years in an industry where things last 3, max

*several* power tool and manual tool brands

Basically any company that works with real leather.

Victorinox

Kitchen Aide

Word travels for basically all high quality products. They also cost like they’re high quality.

> Kitchen Aid

Am pleased with the dishwasher and range from them. But the microwave electronics went out, so now I go with a cheap microwave.

I believe they’re referring to the KitchenAid stand mixer, a piece of equipment that’s known for being stoutly built. [1] (I know several people who’ve had theirs for decades.)

Sadly, anything other appliance branded KitchenAid is basically hit-or-miss. They license their name to other manufacturers for certain products, so you can’t count on the name on its own to guarantee quality.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=0qKp-0h9P18

Cars are more durable than ever, electronics often become obsolete before their life ends, and many building material would last a lifetime but become out of fashion so are thrown away.

Good news, then. We can avoid destroying our ecosystem and destroy companies that make shoddy goods that go quickly into the bin in one stroke!

I agree that this isn't the consumer's problem, but I don't agree government policy or taxes incentivize anything but fraud. Do we really need even more government contractors?

Taxes are basically a shortcut to adjusting market forces to result in a more desirable behavior. Fraud is possible only if the incentive is poorly aligned with the result, allowing people to take advantage of an alternate, but easier, action to benefit from the program. Lawmakers who give in to the demands of special interests will inevitably create these loopholes, it does not happen in a vacuum.

Product manufacturers should have to bear the cost of disposing the products/packaging they ship. It would be great if every product came stamped with some manufacturer ID code or something, and when you throw it away, the waste management company eventually scans it all and each manufacturer got billed based on material/weight/etc.

Manufacturers would just transfers to the consumer. We have a CRV tax for each bottle/can here in California, and as far as I can tell, it has no affect on consumer behavior.

>Manufacturers would just transfers to the consumer

As opposed to not transferring the cost when they're forced to use glass bottles or whatever? Plastic is used because it's cheap. Switching to alternatives would undoubtedly cost more money.

>We have a CRV tax for each bottle/can here in California, and as far as I can tell, it has no affect on consumer behavior.

Maybe this says something about the effectiveness of plastic bottles? If consumers/companies are still choosing plastic bottles even though they have to pay the disposal costs, maybe this means that plastic bottles are better as a whole and we shouldn't be trying to force a switch to alternatives?

Here it's become a cottage industry for the homeless to go around collecting and turning in materials.

CRV doesn't work as well because it's not on the (literal) sticker price, so it gets appended after the consumer has already made a buying decision in most cases.

I think you can go farther than this that it's in the interests of industry to deflect blame to individual citizens because it distracts from the fact that big problems need to be solved at choke-points, and manufacturing is one of the biggest ones we have.