A lot of discussion on this thread revolves around whose responsibility it is to ensure clean-up of plastic waste (producers or consumers) while ignoring the fact that companies are using a material that lasts 10,000 years for items that are single-use. That should be outright illegal unless there are literally no alternatives.
Is it really debatable about "who" left the garbage on the ground?
Even if something only lasts a couple years, do we still want biodegrading trash littering everything? (we have raw food products right now, I wouldn't want those on the beach either...)
It's abundantly clear that placing blame and expectation entirely on the shoulders of consumers is bollocks. Humans drop litter - just look at any festival, concert, or sports match. When it was your granddad it was mostly paper bags, maybe wrapped in newspaper, maybe a few crown corks. The glass got carefully taken home as there was a hefty deposit on those beer bottles! Now it's knee-deep single use everywhere.
That hasn't changed as you look at poorer countries, or back into the past. What has changed is extensive industry lobbying pretending it's not fucking obvious and working to abolish deposit and return schemes, and use of far more benign materials - like glass. It's as bad as tobacco or asbestos all over again.
The same plastic industry that fucking lobbied the government against suggestions that plastic packaging should contain a third recycled plastic.
Not only should it be outright illegal, countless industry's execs are deserving of lengthy spells in prison or a law that says you can chuck used plastic in their mansion's garden. :)
That stuff matters, but of far greater importance is the volume of plastic made. We make too much. It’s not particularly hard to reduce your usage a lot, but I think that’s coming at it from the wrong end. The manufacturers need to be incentivised to do better. Carrot and stick, with the stick getting bigger over time.
I don't buy it. See CydeWeys's comments around this thread. Also, having lots of people cleaning the streets only makes it look like there's little littering.
> I think it's important to tackle the issue from both ends.
Sure. Thing is, tackling it from the corporate end will be ridiculously more effective than trying to instill new societal norms.
The all-around cleanliness of Japanese mega cities comes as culture shock to people coming from other big cities in the world. This tidiness is not due to millions of tax dollars spent on street cleaners and “Let’s-cleanup-our-city” campaigns. It’s not due to effective public works or community service. It’s due to one simple thing: They don’t throw their garbage on the floor.
Ever heard the rule, "pack it in, pack it out"? Or "leave the campground better than you left it"? That means not only do you not litter, you pick up any litter in case a previous person left something.
Teaching people this when they are kids makes a real impact. It has compounding effects over time.
That said, companies should also invest more in biodegradable packaging and using much less packaging generally. Since there will always be some litterbugs and trash that gets caught in the wind or falls off a truck, etc. It should be something we tackle from both the producer and consumer ends.
Yeah, in religious congregations of a particularly controlling near-Christian denomination.
> Or "leave the campground better than you left it"?
Yeah, in movies. I hear that Boy Scouts actually adhere to that rule.
I've only ever seen these two rules applied in a pretty top-down fashion as tight-knit community rules. It's not something I've seen random people invoking in generic situations, so I'm not sure if it scales to the level of a city or a country.
If it's "just like any other cultural norm", then we still have a problem - as I wrote upthread and elsewhere, cultural norms are extremely difficult to create or change. You're much better off seeking different points of intervention... like making producers of (what becomes) trash involved and primarily responsible for reducing the amount of litter.
But there are obvious and relatively clear buttons that can be pressed in order to have industry at a macro scale stop doing something whereas the same buttons are not so easy an clear to press at a cultural scale.
And, nonetheless, I am of the belief that macro changes have perhaps an order of magnitude more impact that micro changes in this area.
1. There are countries where littering is "expected" and a normal part of society. (I've seen this culture in the US, they will dump their trash directly in the street)
2. There are countries where littering is both "illegal" and socially "unacceptable". (it's generally shameful to litter)
Which countries will have less litter if corporations are incentivized to change their products or make less stuff?
I am not a US citizen but take offence at your statement that "littering is "expected" and a normal part of society" simply because you've seen someone do it. I am pretty sure you can find examples of littering in even the most strict of cultures. Especially when people believe they can easily get away with it.
Some cultures expect people to litter. I witnessed people from these cultures, in my country, littering where it's illegal and socially disgraceful. These people were confronted and they still left their trash on the ground, the people that confronted them picked up their litter for them.
I hope this clarifies my statement.
Unless you are claiming there is not a single culture that doesn't expect people to litter?
Of course as well as extreme and draconian legislation, like banning gum, they're a tiny city-state. Yet Singapore employs vast numbers of cleaners and street sweepers clearing up - which surely shouldn't be necessary? Far more per-capita than any Western city. So even they seem to recognise it will happen anyway.
Never visited Japan, but when I have been in Germany, Denmark and Sweden (nearest I've been to Finland!) they seemed to employ more cleaning - or at least more noticeably - than I expect to see in say modern day UK. I do notice, because UK and many other places are bleak in terms of litter compared to what I remember from childhood and early adulthood, in both extent and type. Nowhere has been nearly as bad about litter as the US though. I haven't visited for well over a decade so maybe they got better.
A vast transformation of the amount of packaging and type along with far fewer bins (who the hell thought that a good idea?) and cleaners, gardeners, and people mowing verges. All of which now seem to go by the benchmark "as little as we can get away with". Now add the disowning of any part of blame by business and producers as I mentioned originally. We certainly used to accept that some would always happen and employed enough to make sure the place stayed nice regardless, and the tidier places still seem to. We also presumed reuse far more often, and systems were built to expect that.
We also have a different attitude - more accepting of litter, though not as bad as in the eighties and early nineties when apparently no one in the UK gave a shit, and it was everywhere. Amsterdam, Stockholm and Paris have changed similarly, though none as much as here. Paris is perhaps worst of those.
The US has a lot of variation in litter depending on where you are at, so YMMV. In my experience, go to a nice business district or more upper-class neighborhood/suburb - the streets are well-kept and generally low in litter to maintain a good impression of the area. Go to an industrial zone or lower-class part of town (i.e. off the usual path for tourists and middle-upper class people) and there's trash scattered everywhere. The trash just sits there ignored because, for lack of a better way to say it, there is no one on hand whose job it is to pickup the trash.
There are still places that have a "don't give a shit" attitude about litter, and people are also reluctant to go out of their way to pick up litter without incentive. In my opinion, there is somewhat of an expectation that addressing litter is the task of some third-party to take care of (e.g. government, groundskeepers, trash company, etc) - so it doesn't directly fall on the individual. In other words, "somebody else will clean it up" mentality.
In those places that already have a lot of litter, some people are assholes and just say "fuck it, what's an extra unit of litter on top of the pile". Other times, litter unintentionally gets scattered about from the wind and such, yet it's mostly ignored as to not deal with it. As aesthetically awful as it looks and environmentally damaging, people put horse blinders on to tune it out of their lives even though it's all around.
If I had to compare with other countries:
- Japan doesn't even have trashcans throughout, and the onus is on the individual to 'do the right thing'. (Gold Standard)
- Germany has trashcans, and individuals will generally follow the instructions for disposal. (Silver Standard)
- US has trashcans, and as long as individuals get the trash in/on/near the trashcan it's 'good enough'. (Bronze Standard)
I'm just leaving Japan after spending a week touring around the country, and I definitely did see litter. Not as much on the streets as in the US, but still some, and the beach was absolutely jam-packed with litter that had washed ashore.
Litter is inevitable. A lot or the time it isn't even conscious. You can just forget that you had set a bottle down next to you, and happen not to look back when you're leaving. Or it can fall out of your pocket or backpack unnoticed when you're retrieving something else. Or the wind can just blow it out of a trash can or vehicle.
Why make your vision of human success hinge on a sudden global capacity to not litter objects for which there is zero incentive not to litter? Think about all the great or crazy human successes; do you think they were enabled by perfect individuals? We build a society to make individual failings obsolete, the opposite (upholding society through global individual rigour) is not sustainable.
And Scandinavia. Plus here in Norway people actually pick up what litter there is either just casually when out for a walk or in organized gangs set up by sports clubs and so on. The kommune (local council) pays for this to be done to clean up shorelines etc.
Britain is far and away the worst country I have ever been to for litter even though it is much better than it used to be.
Of course one thing that helps here is that every drinks bottle or can carries a deposit (roughly 10 to 20 pence sterling) that can be redeemed at any supermarket.
> where littering is not socially acceptable and happens less than other places.
It's great that there are places where littering is much less due to social norms. But it's not zero. People litter. Period.
To a first approximation, humans can be modeled as points wandering around on a map, and at each timestep there is some nonzero probability they will just drop garbage on the ground. This is true the world over, in every single country I've been, on essentially every hiking trail, no matter how remote or inaccessible. If you were to have a heatmap of litter the world over, it would very closely approximate the simple heatmap of where people have been. Just look at any stretch of highway. Unless it has just been cleaned up by a very thorough cleanup crew, you will find trash. And this is where people are riding around in vehicles that could as well just keep their trash in the backseat. People go out of their way to throw that shit out the window. People can't even get trash into a fricking trash can. It will literally be sitting on the ground next to a trash can.
People are trash monkeys. You can knock one or two orders of magnitude off the litter problem with education, societal norms, fines, etc. But people are trash monkeys, and whereever they go, they fucking litter. It's as inescapable as nuclear decay. It's just a function of probability.
> But people are trash monkeys, and whereever they go, they fucking litter. It's as inescapable as nuclear decay. It's just a function of probability.
When you talk about large populations, a lot of things normally considered individual responsibility suddenly become a function of probability. That's why I believe in many cases we should shift responsibility from individuals to organizations at the other end of a transaction.
E.g. if you know that roughly 5% of casino gamblers end up addicted and in life-ruining debt, and 0.1% of gamblers end up dying or killing people because of that, you can't open a new casino and shield yourself behind "it's the people who can't control themselves". You knew the probabilistic model, you used it to profit, you're responsible for some deaths and for ruining people's lives.
That's IMO doubly important if the probabilistic models has incentive knobs that you control.
> It's abundantly clear that placing blame and expectation entirely on the shoulders of consumers is bollocks. Humans drop litter
That statement is false. Not all humans drop litter. In the west it is widely taught as wrong, often punishable by fines. Find me the person who states they should have a right to litter please. Not to mention the fact that biogradable packagi\
ng does little to nothing by way of helping littered refuse. It will have to be collected anyway.
There is no philosophy whereby you can excuse the individual action in this case except when trying to justify a wide range of other things as the basis of a broken polemic. Your last sentiment in that post entirely confirms this.
> Not only should it be outright illegal, countless industry's execs are deserving of lengthy spells in prison or a law that says you can chuck used plastic in their mansion's garden. :)
Defense in depth is a useful concept for a lot more than just security.
Yes, of course people shouldn't litter. But some will anyway, and even in the unlikely event that no one on Earth litters ever again, plenty of trash will still escape from trash cans, trash trucks, etc., especially on windy days.
So the answer is we need defense in depth against litter. Littering should of course be curtailed to the maximum extent possible, but the litter itself should not last indefinitely upon escaping into the environment. It should degrade in a reasonable amount of time, or at least be totally inert and non-disruptive to animals and the environment (which plastic is not).
So you're both right. All available measures should be taken, so that combined, the optimal result is achieved.
Even in the most well-behaved country, everyone will drop some litter at some point - even if through hurry or accident. When you multiply "once every thousand opportunities" by city's population density, you still get a lot of litter. Add to that people who're drunk and people who simply don't give a fuck, add random spillage (e.g. wind knocking trashcans over or pulling trash out of them), and you get a visible fraction of litter simply, probabilistically caused by just so much trash being produced.
Yet everywhere humans gather, for the entirety of our existence, there is litter. A good chunk of archaeology is sifting through ancient litter - as it is so consistently prevalent.
We will continue to have litter no matter how much teaching, fining or visible policing there is. See Singapore - highly developed laws on littering, fines, and very visible policing. Yet they still employ a more than average amount of people to keep the place looking spick and span. That should simply not be necessary if it's down to attitude or teaching alone. It would all be in the bin back at home or hotel.
Seems like that statement is still very true globally, and will remain so - despite best efforts of teaching, legislature and culture.
What has changed, and changed markedly, is single use packaging on the back of industry pressure and lobbying. No longer do business seem to feel part of the problem or the solution, or even of society and the problems they create within it. Just call it an externality and be done. Hence the rise of lobbying pushing it away and onto the customer, as it's cheaper and easier - for them alone. You end up with armfuls more waste just from a single takeaway, including the always useless plastic or wood coffee stirrer.
To solve the problem that part of responsibility has to be pushed back to source, where it was created. Whilst society again employ enough people to keep cities and tourist spots looking attractive - as well as expecting individuals to act well. Placing it entirely on recipient alone is indeed bollocks, as is giving industry an ever bigger free-pass to produce more and more regardless.
Sometimes people litter by accident. On many hikes I've picked up things which have either fallen out of a backpack - like a still sealed energy drink - or was forgotten there - like a jacket.
What if every person had been issued a certain limited credit amount for a lifetime? And then they can decide what to do:
- drink from plastic bottles
- have children
- have a personal car
- wear cotton t-shirts
- go some retail therapy
- have a large lawn
- fly to exotic vacations
- ...
What if this credit could be not equal for everybody but adjusted by how useful persons contributions are for other people? It could be dynamic!
Wait, we already have that. It's called money and doesn't help all that much for polution from single use, forever trash items. Maybe they are just priced wrong?
I think if government just cleaned up the oceans and sent bill to Coca-Cola for each bottle, market would solve things fairly quickly.
The survey found that 10 companies were responsible for more than half of the identifiably branded rubbish found on the UK’s beaches."
But are they? Isn't this shifting the blame from the end user that improperly disposes of their trash to the company? Sure, they could do more to reduce packaging issues, but in the end, it is the consumer that is tossing these things out rather than recycling them.
If you develop an app, and everybody using your app always ends up deleting their data by clicking on the wrong button, and then people complain that your app loses data...
...in the end, the users are wrong in the moment, but the real problem is that your app allows a behavior that has negative outcomes, and the proper fix isn't to educate people, but to make it impossible for people to click that delete button so easily, or maybe make the deletion recoverable.
Maybe the users of coca-cola bottles are the problem, but maybe coca-cola should be made to not make products that have a propensity to be misused.
Smoking culture in Japan appears to discourage smoking outside. In many places smoking outside is illegal. However some trains, many shopping centers and most restaurants have designated smoking areas.
As such you’re somewhat less likely to see cigarette butts on the street in Japan in any case.
You know those little smoking enclosures that some airports have?
Yeah, those are all over Japan outside (albeit not air-tight ones). You only see people smoking in them or in buildings where smoking is allowed, commonly bars.
It's a pretty great way of controlling cigarette butt litter, actually.
Yup. Also, when smoking outside, people do have a strong incentive to dump the butt ASAP, whether there's a trash can in sight or not - cigarette butts are dirty, smell really bad (even for smokers' standards), and can foil clothing.
How much street cleaning staff do Japanese employ?
Anyway, the example still works. Even if littering was purely societal, on the timescale of years society is fixed. It doesn't change. You can't suddenly convince people to pretty please change social norms. Your options are either a) get a law in place that directly addresses undesired behavior, which is not free and works only to the degree you'll enforce it, or b) stop playing off the obvious failure mode of your society for your personal gains.
I'm leaving Japan right now after having spent a week here and I definitely saw a noticeable number of people cleaning up litter.
The best was an old man pulling a map out of the mouth of a Nara deer that was eating it, then scolding the deer like it was a dog. So yeah, even the deer are taking care of litter, even if they shouldn't be. I also saw a bunch of them eating the paper ribbons that the deer crackers come packaged in.
Agree. I think you need to assume that people will litter. I think changing the material to something that can decompose would be a better approach. Maybe if the government gave some sort of subsidy to make the private companies do this?
Japanese cities and streets may look clean, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that Japan still contributes a big chunk to the world's plastic pollution through "leaks" in the system.
On the otherhand I have tons of first hand experience with bottles, and its a very simple task to take care of your own trash. Its just a matter of doing it.
Went with cowerkers hiking once, we had more than enough to drink with us. What we didn't plan on was a convenient way to carry the bottles, so around half way to our target we had to rest and decide what to do with them. Either leave them there and collect them on the way back or accept that they will be a pain to carry around for the rest of the day. We later found a place where we could drop them off, but getting there was far from just "doing it".
Lesson learned: plan ahead and get something convenient to carry.
I think the bottle deposit is an interesting optimization.
That said, I remember being in mexico and when you buy a coke "to go", they don't want to bottle to walk away. So they helpfully pour it in a plastic bag, stick a straw in it and seal the plastic bag to the straw with a rubber band.
So now instead of a single bottle, you have a plastic bag, a straw, and a rubber band as litter all the while destroying any guarantees of not getting food borne illnesses.
I'm old enough to clearly remember when Coca Cola was distributed in glass bottles. There was no plastic of any kind, except for maybe a gasket inside the metal cap. Individual serving size bottles had bottle caps and larger size had metal screw caps with metal safety-seal thingies that broke off when you opened it for the first time. All of them had deposits that were refunded when you turn them in.
I don't know about the economics or logistical feasibility of returning to the same setup, but to suggest it's not possible (while still ensuring product safety) is inaccurate.
We do it for beer, so I don't see why not. At least in Ontario, I've seen people walking into the LCBO with cases of empty bottles (I don't drink alcohol myself, so can't confirm how prevalent this is).
But glass bottles are heavy, and I'm sure that makes shipping more expensive and increases CO2 emissions.
For what it's worth, beer seems to be transitioning back to cans now on the high end. Cans are much lighter, still just as recyclable, and crucially, they keep the product fresher (which matters more for nice beer than for soda).
I'm old enough to remember when all drinks came in standard 0.5 and 0.3L bottles, which were returned for a sizable deposit, shipped back to the factory, steam-cleaned, and reused...
>in the end, the users are wrong in the moment, but the real problem is that your app allows a behavior that has negative outcomes, and the proper fix isn't to educate people, but to make it impossible for people to click that delete button so easily, or maybe make the deletion recoverable.
this is the kind of thinking that kills apps for power-users, and leads to dark patterns.
You're not wrong, but I don't really like to think about how those kind of practices could be applied to social problems and government.
"We don't want X people doing Y, so let's subtly make it harder for X people to continue doing Y, without wholeheartedly admitting our intent." seems like a really slippery slope.
The GP isn't saying don't have the feature. They're saying don't have the delete button next to the save button, labelled ambiguously, and without a confirmation step.
> this is the kind of thinking that kills apps for power-users, and leads to dark patterns.
Not necessarily. Well-applied, this thinking is what gave you --no-preserve-root in rm command. You still can delete your entire drive, you just won't do it by accident anymore.
I agree with your anxiety here though, some people do take this idea and turn it into "this feature is too dangerous; let's remove it for your own good", and nerf an otherwise useful tool.
> "We don't want X people doing Y, so let's subtly make it harder for X people to continue doing Y, without wholeheartedly admitting our intent." seems like a really slippery slope.
That this work is at this point a Nobel-winning insight (the "nudge"), so it's a matter of who's doing it and for what. It turns out that "free will" is a concept with little meaning at scale - large populations behave predictably.
>If you develop an app, and everybody using your app always ends up deleting their data by clicking on the wrong button, and then people complain that your app loses data...
Throwing trash on the ground is not comparable to clicking the wrong button.
There is no confusion going on here, only laziness.
Ban plastic bottles. Make them use glass bottles in a closed cycle where the bottles are constantly cycled and then turned into something else when they can't be cycled... or use aluminum which is recyclable.
And let's call out recycling for the sham that it is. Recycling is a lie for plastics, plastics can not be economically recycled. They must be banned and the polluters made to internalize the externality.
Glass bottles are not perfect. They are lots heavier, which leads to transportation pollution. They also break and hurt people.
As to plastics - You are correct, they do not recycle and when you try to do it, even with a very low ratio of recycled to new plastics you end up with crappy weak plastic - think laundry baskets that have handles that break easily.
i think we should just learn to burn plastics - efficiently and cleanly.
I'm down for completely banning single use plastics: everything from shopping bags to clamshell packaging can go tomorrow IMHO. Same with styrofoam, frankly.
Having said that glass bottles were a nightmare when I was a kid because of littering assholes who would toss them anywhere. Littering is less of an issue these days but I think going back to glass would need to both reward recycling and shame litter bugs. Walking home from the local swimming hole after slicing the bottom of your foot open is no fun.
Yep, the hazards of broken glass are one of the downsides of glass. However, we have that situation now mostly with beer bottles. I routinely pick up roadside trash in my subdivision and much of what I pick up is glass beer bottles.
The other downside (as others have already pointed out) is the weight of heavy glass containers built for reuse. It raises the cost of distribution.
We had it. I grew up returning glass bottles and worked at a bottling company in the late 80s doing nothing but sorting glass bottles by brand and type so that they could be washed, sanitized, filled and sent right back out. The job sucked.
This was also about the time we started getting 2 liter plastic bottles.
What extra CO2 from shipping? When Coca Cola was distributed in glass bottles there were local (or regional) bottling centers. The Coca Cola syrup was distributed to these bottling centers and they're the ones that filled bottles for local/regional distribution. I don't recall any problems with CO2.
Replying to my own comment. Initially, I was thinking that the mention of CO2 was related to carbonation in the drink. It's now clear to me that it was reference to CO2 emissions of transporting goods that would be significantly heavier.
It seems to me that if CO2 emissions for distributing heavier, reusable glass containers is a significant problem for our society, I can't imagine what we'll do with all the other (unrelated) things we have (and do) that have much bigger problems with emissions.
I'd say make it a semi-luxury product. A once/twice per month $3.75 - $5.75 pleasure that comes in a glass bottle. The sweet refreshing taste of Coca-Cola should not be an everyday thing (otherwise it becomes an health issue). So you reduce C02 & health impact and maintain profitability.
And who determines the amount an individual can consume per month? I have friends and family that drink at least a bottle a day and have no plans on stopping.
For bottles it is probably the majority. Followed by glas for beer and wine and aluminum cans.
For the rest, plastic contains a good amount of energy. You can burn it and recover some energy from it. It also reduces the volume of the waste by 80%.
As someone else has said above:
companies are using a material that lasts 10,000 years for items that are single-use. That should be outright illegal unless there are literally no alternatives.
I think a big part of the issue is also about what packaging choices are made, materials-wise. Surely not to say that people chucking their aluminum cans in the trash aren't also part of the problem, but corporations have a much bigger amount of influence and fault for pollution (packaging and non-packaging-wise).
> It's infuriating to me how so many Hacker Newsites refuse to hold corporations accountable for their design flaws.
I have a silent hope that each thread like this means some commenters who haven't thought about this much before will achieve the crucial insights, like: (per GP) assigning blame isn't productive, effective solutions are; (per you) there's no easy way to just make people "be better", at scale people are predictable and follow incentives, so the main points of intervention should be these incentives and systems that create them.
I remember reading (yeah, not much of a citation, I know...) that recycling was invented so people wouldn't feel so bad about disposable packaging.
Considering recycling can mean shipping trash to a poor country, it's not the ultimate environment rescuer. (Doesn't mean we should stop doing it, obviously)
The beverage industry knows they have a festering PR problem. I recently got a random poll from the American Beverage Association. They were primarily interested in understanding how people feel about the industry’s sustainability (or lack thereof). The good news is based on some of the questions they asked it sounds like they’re considering bringing back glass containers.
Just spent 2 weeks on Sabah, Borneo. Even the very remote beaches hours away from large human settlements are littered with plastic bottles and grocery bags. While diving you often see bags floating around. Both, on the surface and below.
Ironically even the island hopping boat carried a tray of bottled water for anyone to take. Not sure what % of bottles gets left behind at the end of the day.
Maybe a small deposit on each bottle would help to essentially pay people to collect them.
A small deposit is no incentive. Now if it were a significant amount like $.50-$1.00 per bottle you recycle, then you'd have people literally racing to get those bottles. Then just increase the price on the drinks itself by a bit to make up for that, which is also a disincentive to discourage a number of people from buying them in the first place.
I highly doubt the 10 cents per bottle is the exclusive reason--I wish that article talked more about it. The $0.10 could pay for the other reasons, but I think it's equally about infrastructure and culture as it is about cost.
Culturally, people are only willing to put up with so much. There's a Penn and Teller BS clip where he has like 10 unique recycling bins and is explaining sorting to them. I've been to towns where you have to haul all of your trash out, but at Disney they found that people aren't willing to carry trash more than 30ft.
I feel like I do more than most. I set aside batteries, and hoard the few single use bags I use. I drove to a Best Buy because I saw they had battery recycling, but when I arrived they excluded alkalines. I'm honestly not sure which plastics my curb-side accepts. I know that's what the number in the logo is for, but I have trouble finding it and I'm not sure what's accepted. I wish there was a simpler system, like the plastics were dyed blue, had a blue stripe, or something distinguishing.
Is their program successful because of the $0.10 redemption? Or is it because they have a lot of redemption centers? No city I've lived in honor redemptions for curb-side, which is often a large percentage.
> I highly doubt the 10 cents per bottle is the exclusive reason--I wish that article talked more about it. The $0.10 could pay for the other reasons, but I think it's equally about infrastructure and culture as it is about cost.
i believe you are correct. note my response to another poster about returning bottles and cans here in oregon.
Incentive for who though? For the homeless and very poor, who probably will not even be the ones purchasing those bottles(at least at the same rate as those in higher economic classes) in the first place? We need to make it worth it for the good number of consumers who buy these things, so that they don't litter in the first place and put more thought about those $0.50-$1.00 per bottle they're tossing out. Yes, this may make it so that less bottles are available for the homeless/impoverished, but I think we should be doing way more for them than giving them the scraps that are 10 cent bottles...
The UK introduced a carrier bag charge scheme. Overnight usage dropped 80%, and that was for a 5p charge. Now I don't think many people would stop to pick up 5p off the street, but people will jump through the hoops to avoid paying the 5p. These things work, even at a relatively low threshold. Don't forget you're only aim to nudge what people know they should already be doing.
a little more than that - oregon has bags that can be returned full without counting and left in a secured room to have the money deposited to an account a few days later. given that these are typically at grocery stores and several of them add on a redemption percentage (fred meyer adds 20% for in-store credit use), the number of non-homeless making returns is high.
It’s a psychological effect. Same reason why Whole Foods charged $0.25 to get a cart, and then returned you the money. People tend to return the carts after paying the money.
I don't think this is the whole story, since as far as I'm aware the only people who get the redemption are people who put very low value on their time because it's inconvenient to actually redeem bottles.
"Pant"[0] is very common across most of northern europe- what you tend to find is that people will pilfer public trash cans to get bottles and cans to dispense, in Sweden where I live it's 1kr (or 10c in USD) for a can or small bottle, and large bottles being 2kr.
Not everyone is so fortunate to have gainful employment, especially not as gainful as the normal user of this site.
Same here in Helsinki, Finland. People will root around rubbish-bins, and collect the cans/bottles. (Especially in parks, and next to tram-stops. Basically places where people are likely to have had a drink and not recycled themselves.)
How is it inconvenient? I have a bag where I drop all my cans and bottles, when I go shopping I take it with me. Every supermarket takes them regardless of where they came from. No extra trips or detours required.
It's actually a problem at the moment. After the raise to $0.10 deposit, some people started hauling bottles over from Washington. The way the program is funded depends on less than 100% of bottles being returned.
We need something national. And just bottles isn't going to cover it - single use plastic products are cheap enough, and companies have no incentive not to use them, so of course everyone else ends up dealing with them.
Ultimately 100% of deposits were collected, the aim should be to pay out 100% again. That's the aim, that's what success looks like. Now I have no idea how these systems are usually funded, and this probably is quite usual. But you can't complain when your system does what its supposed to. When the return rate reaches 100% then you can celebrate success and start complaining about imports.
Australia has it per state and they have the refund logo printed on the bottle label. Bringing bottles from another state will result in a fine if caught.
Not saying it’s a problem. It is that way to prevent people from buying bottles in Indiana, not paying the deposit, and driving to Michigan to get 10c a bottle.
Small deposits certainly add up. Here in Helsinki you pay 0.15 - 0.50 extra when you buy bottled/canned drinks, and you can return the empty containers to pretty much any shop to get your cash.
There are homeless people who survive on the income from collecting bottles in the city-center, in parks, and even from rubbish-bins. It's not unusual to see a small group of people with large plastic-bags containing hundreds of empty cans/bottles.
In California they have CRV, which is a kinda significant recycling amount.
However it doesn’t stop people throwing away plastic stuff. What it _does_ do, is create a job for the army of homeless people to go around collecting bottles so they can claim that sweet cashback.
It’s effectively a very strange way of employing people at far below minimum wage to keep the streets clean. Very odd.
You jest, but that's not far from a good idea. You obviously don't need a blockchain, but you could do something like printing a UID on each bottle and scanning them before giving the refunds.
You are right it was in jest. I stopped short of the colacrypto coin. But your idea sounds good too just some scan and each bottle can be accounted for and at the end of the year have some idea how many make it to recycling.
Most of Australia has 10c deposits on plastic bottles. You virtually never see them laying around outside. Its fairly common to see homeless people walking around with bags full of bottles they found in public bins or on the street.
We also have a 10c charge on plastic bags at supermarkets and you rarely see those floating around anymore and people use them multiple times now.
Coffee cups and fast food boxes are all over the side of the street unfortunately.
Its amazing what a massive difference such a tiny fee can make.
I had a real littering problem around an area I used to live in, council installed a recycling station that people could bring bottles to for a cash reward (10c a bottle).
It worked. Not only did people stop throwing the bottles on the ground as much, we had people driving around the area trying to find discarded plastic bottles, and there was a noticeable improvement on the amount of discarded bottles around the area within months.
The only real problem was people rifling through recycling bins trying to make a buck.
One interesting result of this program is you may find people scrounging around neighbourhoods and trash cans to collect the recyclables so they can collect the deposit on them :)
The locals will clean it up when they start to realize that their tourism industry is going to collapse if their country gets the reputation of being a trashy place to visit.
I was a little surprised when traveling in India the first time and I got a soda. They expect you to wait and give them back the glass bottle once you’re done. This was at a local stand, of course there’s plastic bottles elsewhere.
At first it felt weird, but then I realized how much better it is for everyone and for the environment to reuse glass bottles. The bottles are washed and reused and even if they ended up in the ocean, we’ll, the world was none the worst for it.
It made me sad we moved away from this. I’d love to see glass used more often again for drinks.
I remember that years ago a project at the University of Arizona was doing archaeological work on landfills. It turned out that surprising amount of the non-degrading material found once you dug down a bit was telephone books.
newspapers dumped in landfills as much as over half a century ago, turn up again as fresh and as readable as the day they were issued.
Amazing.
I imagine if the paper were shredded and mixed with organic matter it might brake down more rapidly, but layered and trapped away underground evidently not.
According to the interwebs, it wasn't until the 1960's that plastic bottles became popular in the United States, but I don't remember them until the early 80's.
Before then, soda always came in cans with pull-tabs that would slice your toes open at the beach.
As someone who has worked in the beverage industry. Please don't bring back glass. It's so heavy, it's fragile, and it don't stack efficiently. Beer is finally moving to cans a change which has only happened in the last few years. It's easier to move and store, a twelve oz can takes up about 3/5s the space of a 12oz bottle.
I think the aluminium cans have a thin plastic or polymer coating on the inside too, which stops the drink from tasting like metal... so not sure if it's 100% plastic free either.
Even with zero packaging, their product is addictive poison. Buffett has spoken proudly of how, normally the human body would not be able to drink that much sugar without getting immediately sick, but the coke formula overcomes that sugar overload response. Disgusting.
That’s actually something I have been thinking about. How do they get so much sugar into a drink? You could never produce something drinkable with this amount of sugar.
A quick search shows that juices are at least as sugary if not moreso, especially grape juice.
I live next to a shop that squeezes fresh juice, but I mix it with at least three parts carbonated water. Otherwise it's such an easy way to overconsume calories. And possibly the least fulfilling way, as well.
In the US we get our sugar from high fructose corn syrup unless we spend more to buy the imported Mexican Coke that's made with real cane sugar.
When I lived in Seattle, I always found it amusing that soccer moms would brag about buying Mexican Coke at Whole Foods like it was something special. They could just drive an hour north and buy Canadian Coke, which is also made with sugar, for half the price!
They're talking about returnables which is how beer used to come. Imagine instead of just recycling your beer bottles you hauled it back to the store for it to be sent back to vendor. I've worked around refillable milk containers and it was a pain in the ass, beer I can only imagine is more so.
It would be absolutely nuts if anyone wanted to use non-standard bottles or specific glass colorings. A standardized bottle that everyone used (only label as differentiation) would be cool.
20k identifiable pieces of trash, small sample size. Even if it's good math ~ perhaps its a numbers game of popularity in brands? Coke was 15% Pepsi 10% ... and I'm sure other brands of aluminum can waste we're their proportional share..
Technically, Coca-Cola consumers are the most common source of packaging pollution on UK beaches. That's a lot different than what the title states. Since Coca-cola is the largest seller of beverages in containers, it only is common sense that would be true. But hey, blame Coke. Let's blame the ocean for people drowning as well, or the local utilities for people being electrocuted or gravity for people falling to their death.
This is the same philosophy that led to the bank crysis in 2009. Banks were saying that it's not their fault; rather the government was at fault with its lax regulations.
I don't think corporations are solely to blame. In Japan they use a lot of plastic packaging[0], and have a lack of public rubbish bins[1], yet they don't litter[2]. Can we not hold customers accountable as well for not disposing of their garbage properly, as they do in Japan?
Same goes for Singapore. Crime to littler and also the culture there values cleanliness of the city. When I was there I almost never saw trash on the ground, ever. I once saw a plastic cup get blown off some lady's table and the next person who was working on the street who saw it picked it up and tossed it in the trash bin. Public trash bins are everywhere. Absolutely a world-class city in every sense of it.
Jetlagged in Tokyo one morning (maybe 4:30 AM local), I watched a lady open her eatery.
She cleaned and readied everything inside, swept the front curb of her shop, then proceeded to perfectly sweep the ~10' wide sidewalk in front of her place to the street's edge.
How Tokyo lives with its hyperdensity suddenly made sense.
Good thing in Japan, even if one or two people litter, there's at least 100 other fine people who will be there to pick up after you happily without even thinking about it.
I would pay at least $5 per item never to see Styrofoam packaging again. But this is impossible because the market is incapable of offering me this sort of thing. Putting it on consumers is unfair.
So by that logic, if I sold you a car and you abandoned it in the middle of a busy freeway, it would then be my fault?
I’m not on the side of big business, ever really. But this is insane logic (today it’s all to common too). The PEOPLE doing the littering are the problem, if it’s not a coke can it’s something else. Assign responsibility where it’s deserved. It easy to blame big money and business these days for the shortcomings of people.
Make it a crime with not only a hefty fine, but demanded personal time on community service. Some people don’t care about money, but everyone cares about their time.
It works just fine for the Japanese and in Singapore.
> Why should our overburdened local governments carry the cost of picking up a profitable business' garbage?
As an outsider looking in, perhaps because local governments are largely funded by taxpayers, and taxpayers are ultimately the root cause of the litter?
Consider the status quo of litter in countries like Japan and Singapore.
I think if the problem is to be effectively solved, things need to happen on 3 fronts: local government that establishes effective law/infrastructure, companies with cognizance that take meaningful action, and a population with the right cultural values.
I've been thinking about this lately. How hard would it be for Tim Hortons to implement a deposit system for re-usable plastic cups? A deposit cup could cost two dollars, and every time you buy coffee you hand in your dirty cup and they give you a clean one. To encourage people to use the deposit cups, charge 10 cents each for disposable cups. If you want your two dollars back, just return the cup.
It wouldn't slow down drive throughs at all, because unlike using your own re-usable cups, deposit cups can be filled before you get to the window. They would need to develop some standard language to make ordering simple, but people would get used to it fast enough, especially if they make deposit cups the default after a while.
Tim Hortons is on every street corner, so it already has a strong network effect, making something like this feasible (I bet most Tims customers are regulars).
The cups would be standard, so an automated cup washer wouldn't be too difficult. They could also be semi-insulated, which would be a huge improvement over those flimsy cardboard sleeves or double cups (which is usually what happens).
"It is absolutely their fault that their customers are throwing their products onto our ground."
WAT!
A company is not responsible for it's irresponsible consumers!
Also their no scapegoat for irresponsible people who litter. That is the crux of the issue here.
Rallying against a large corporation because people litter with their product is effectively excusing people who litter. That is wrong - don't go there.
> A company is not responsible for it's irresponsible consumers!
No but they are responsible for foisting externalities onto society in order to save a few cents per transaction.
If they only sold coffee in steel thermal capped mugs, for $5 each, then the litter problem would evaporate. But that would require more expensive logistics and storage and transactional overhad.
Shouldn’t the consumer be responsible for throwing their trash away properly? The local government is a government of the local people: if the people would stop throwing stuff on the ground, there wouldn’t be so much trash to pick up. That burden is created by the local people. Should paint companies be held responsible for graffiti?
> The local government is a government of the local people
And that government, knowing that relying on individuals hasn't worked, still needs to find a way to solve the problem. A possible solution is to make the corporation responsible for the trash they produce. Once this happens, the corporation will begin to explore options such as rewarding customers for returning used cups, providing reusable cups, and even employing people to pick up any of their cups littered throughout the city.
Ultimately, the responsibility lies with the corporation if they are instilling a polluting culture that benefits them. There are edge cases in this argument of course, but in my opinion, a large number of companies produce mountains of wasteful unrecyclable packaging in the name of brand-building or low cost. They use this to bolster their business, and therefore they should be ultimately responsible for cleaning it up.
If you wanted to talk about the costs of disposing of packaging, then there’s some valid points you could make. But to say producers are responsible for littering is insane. There’s nothing about Coca Cola as a company, or the way their products are packaged, or the way they sell them that would lead me to throw the packaging on the ground rather than in the trash can. Anybody that litters is wholly responsible for that act. If you wanna discuss what happens to the packaging after it’s thrown in the trash or the recycling bin, and who bears the costs, then there’s arguments you can make for the producer to have additional responsibilities, but it’s not their job to make sure the consumer doesn’t litter.
People litter because it's convenient. Corporations ignore litter because it's convenient. The truth is everyone plays their part in this, but it is my opinion that those that produce waste must have a plan to deal with it.
For example, Coke could offer to refill their drink bottles, but the truth is, if you're out and about and want another pint of coke, you need to buy another container with it, which ultimately will need to be dealt with by your areas waste management system etc etc.
As a company they contribute so much to waste, and draw such significant profits that they must at least be somewhat implicated for the production of this pollution.
Another angle: if cars are being marketed to everyone left right and centre, and lots of people buy cars that ultimately produce tonnes of greenhouse gasses, who do you hold ultimately accountable for the pollution? the consumer who has had adverts/dreams rammed down their throat or the chaps selling the cars?
>my opinion that those that produce waste must have a plan to deal with it.
Any plan to deal with waste is going to be entirely thwarted by people who choose to litter. The lifecycle of Coca Cola packaging could become 100% waste free, but litter would still be created any time somebody chooses the throw the packaging on the ground. People have an individual responsibility to not litter, and it really doesn’t have to do much with the discussion on sustainable packaging. If your starting premise to solving any problem is ‘people are 100% not responsible for their choices’, then you’re never going to solve anything.
Not quite, but it's a low cost convenience that makes people spend on coffee more readily. If they were made to bring their own cup to take coffee out (or some other less polluting method), I bet it would hurt sales significantly.
Most cafes in Australia give a discount (up to 50c) for bringing your reusable cup. It’s very popular and very effective. Of course, disposable cups are still available.
Yes, absolutely. We as a culture need to emphasize people to pick up their trash and be responsible for their own litter. Lots of other culture emphasize this and you rarely see trash on the ground. Trash on the ground is a direct result of the culture saying "who cares if I toss trash on the ground."
But unfortunately, it's infeasible to penalize them directly. And the panopticon required to do so would cause more harm than benefit. Ergo, we target upstream as the least bad solution.
