Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report.
“The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. “It’s time to hold them accountable for the damage they’ve caused.”
I think about this sort of thing from time to time, and every time I come to the same conclusion that manufacturers of bulk goods need to take more responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products. They’re getting a free ride with municipalities stuck footing the bill for recycling plastics, and have zero incentive to solve the problem.
Let’s say the city sent all the recyclables to some regional warehousing facility where they would get sorted by barcode according to manufacturer. Then the companies would be charged for storage and would have strong incentive to come collect their property before it really starts to pile up.
Initially, they will no doubt gripe about it, but in the long term, it may be a win-win in that if say Coca-Cola realizes it can get all its bottles back, it could switch to a more reusable design that could reduce bottling costs?
I mean, in a lot of places outside the US, there are small pallets of bottles that, when emptied, get sent back to the bottler to be refilled.
I do remember a time before widespread recycling when you’d pay a small deposit on a drink and get it back when you returned the bottle to the store. Where I live, alcohol sales still follow that model to some extent.
That was the old school approach and I have no problem with it. But it largely disappeared as municipalities started up recycling programs. I guess it was reasoned that when you do it at a city-wide scale, you cast a broader net and divert more material from the landfill. But as this article mentions, recycling has proven to be a sketchy prospect. It loses money for most cities with exception to aluminum cans where the metal still has some resale value.
One way or another, it would be better if we can get back to more of a reuse approach as opposed to breaking everything down to recycle the raw materials. That just doesn’t seem to be working.
This used to be the case with glass bottles in England back in the 80s. Seemed to work well, certainly I and a lot of other kids used to return as many of those bottles as we could to supplement pocket money. These days all the bottles are plastic and there’s no returns policy.
I’m pretty sure coke and pepsi successfully lobbied to have the bottle/can deposit on pop/soda eliminated
Not everywhere. I have it on plastic coke bottles and also aluminium cans.
Right on! I’d guess you’re in Europe. I just meant to describe how the elimination of the deposit in Canada and the US happened. It was corporate motivated, not municipally motivated. Sorry, I should have been more specific
Indeed. I lived in Canada in the past, they were doing it for cans, but for bottles it was only glass bottles used in restaurants and bars.
Ugh. They need to be part of the solution and not the problem. But you’re probably right…
A better system is to require all grocery/food/packaging, customer facing retailers to record all sales and from which suppliers those products were bought.
Then charge the retailer the average cost of ‘recycling’ or ‘to the planet’, or another measure of cost.
This will increase costs on all products, but by design more on the costs of hard to recycle goods and packaging.
Charge retailers that daily, watch end to end, from supplier/producer to consumer, behaviour change and iterate accordingly.
Start off with an industry sector though, like grocery stores, most are bricks and mortar, and have high brand acknowledgement so can’t easily escape regulation. The key is to charge the location of sale, not the companies ‘HQ’.
It would be relatively easy to implement, as retailers already collect this info for inventory management.
But I fear it wouldn’t go far enough? What we really need to do is close the loop so that product packaging winds up back at the manufacturer for reuse. And everyone needs to be at the table to discuss how that’s going to work, as it is a significant technological and logistical challenge for both the private and public sectors.
Closed loops are a pretty steep expectation. I’m pretty sure (with no evidence to back me up) with the amount of importers, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers in the supply chain for a product on a shelf, it would be a costly proposition to attempt closed loop.
More costly than using a system of levys to promote behavioural change. Which is the idea behind the system i’s suggesting in the previous comment.
Its about changing the system for the better to generate the fewest negative externalities possible. If a closed loop increases costs more than a system of levys, then everyone will be squeezed more than necessary to get the same result, making negative externalities, like black markets, fraud, more likely than they need be.
Cigarettes in Australia are a great example of this in action. There is a black market for Cigarettes here because they are so expensive from the retailers, but the barriers to widespread black market adoption are still perceived as too high for the greater majority of smokers. The result is a small black market, which will almost always exist for any product you can think of, but the government has tightened the screws on smokers in the public market to make it as uncomfortable process as possible for the sale and purchase of Cigarettes. Until the introduction of younger generations vaping, and the lack of younger generations similar experiences with Cigarettes ill effects, the policy position led to a hard disincentive that worked to decrease smoking rates. But, as always, time and creativity need a reaction that we are still trying to get right.