So I finally have some time to address this post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by
wiggin
The sheer amount of :picard: in this thread is amazing. I've avoided it as long as I could, but the inner policymaker in me can't stand it any longer.
There are three intersecting issues related to the use of bottled drinks (water or not):
1. Bottled drinks are fundamentally more expensive than drinks delivered through pipelines. It's a waste of energy, and a polluter (through carbon emissions) to boot. This applies more to water than other drinks because so far we don't yet have piped Coke delivery to our homes - yet. There are some ways around this, but they certainly aren't the identical product to a bottle of Coke.
I totally agree with this, unless you don't have a tap available (hiking, traveling ect.)
Quote:
2. Bottles are made of plastic and disposable, which is a waste of precious oil. (I, along with many chemical engineers, feel that using oil/plastic for something disposable is a crime.)
You can use PET and glass. Glass is perfectly recyclable, but it is quite heavy, so you need more transport energy. PET light, but not perfectily recyclable. But you can still avoid most of the problems using PET.
Quote:
3. Bottles are often not recycled, leading to unnecessary waste. Even if they are recycled, it's a waste of energy for a one time (or few time) use container, when a non-disposable plastic/metal bottle will last for hundreds of uses.
Over here almost all bottles are recycled. So there is room of improvement there.
Quote:
There are three simple policy solutions for this, none of which include something as heavy-handed as a ban.
To address point #1 (transportation waste), this is not an issue specific to bottles but to all transportation. We use gasoline too much because it's too cheap. Therefore, we should tax gas (or, better yet, carbon emissions) to drive down consumption. Particularly wasteful activities - like lugging a truck of water halfway across the country - will decrease through a number of ways. Prices will go up causing demand to drop, bottlers will move to more local distribution to drive down operating costs, etc. Straightforward.
100% agreement on this
Quote:
To address point #2 (waste of perfectly good plastic), we have to be a bit more focused - merely taxing the use of all plastic would be silly, since sometimes plastic is critical for the product in question (just not for the disposable consumption of beverages). It's easy, though, to slap a tax on the sale of all disposable bottled drinks. Many states in the US already do this with 'deposit' schemes, that you can get back if you return it. I know of no one who actually does this, but I have seen the local hobos hunting through my apartment building's recycling bins to take the bottles in for a deposit. So in principle this at least means things are recycled. The big downside here is that the tax is too low, so even if there's an incentive for the poor to recycle, there's no incentive for the front-end consumer to reduce their usage (a nickel is not a lot of money). You'd have the dramatically increase the tax on disposable bottles to make it affect behavior. Certainly there's an equilibrium value that will work, though - in DC the equilibrium value to nearly eliminate the use of disposable plastic shopping bags was $0.05. I imagine it's higher for disposable plastic bottles since there are no ready alternatives for some things, but I imagine a 50 cent tax would be more than enough. Presumably you could scale the tax based on the weight of plastic used - the bigger the container, the better the ratio between base price and tax.
I don't like it when you pay the garbage tax with the product. People wont care for what they pay, they just look at the whole price. Tax the garbage collection per liter, it works easy (you just pay for each liter you want to have collected). People will reduce the ammount of waste as they feel the costs directly.
Quote:
To address point #3 (landfill usage/energy for recycling), it's again a simple matter of incentives. To discourage landfill usage in general - not just for plastic bottles - it's simple enough to charge per unit for garbage collection - something not done very much in the US, I'm afraid.
General purpose landfills for unprocessed waste are forbidden in Switzerland since 2000, waste is usually incinerated and than the leftover is further processed. The heat is also used for energy production.
There are much better things you can do with waste than put it in a landfill.
