A alternative approach could be taxing garbage. Perhaps inevitable once sensors become pervasive and cheap enough. Too some extent this is already done and enforced for disposing of blatantly dangerous things. In some cases you could end up in prison in addition to fines, if caught. The more subtle things that add up to a big problem have been given a lot of leeway.
Right now it is profitable for many parties to extract non-renewable resources, assemble them in to something that has a short life cycle, and be sold to consumers who would rather keep buying the same thing over and over again than a single time. There have been big incentives on the government side for hitting GDP numbers, which has led to both low interest rates and an urgency to extract and process non-renewable resources as quickly as possible. Capital utilization numbers certainly doesn't account for any of this and very well exacerbate the problem.
I don't want to confuse cause and effect here, but the consumption of low quality products directly relates to the volume which they are produced. The actual costs have just been transferred to the future. In the future there will be both fewer resources to produce those goods and more pollution/ecosystem effects to account for it.
At Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder meeting this year Charlie Munger specifically said he thought all petrochemical reserves would be eventually exhausted to make things, not for fuel (there was a specific word he used which I never use and forgot.) Billionaires are thinking about resource exhaustion. Poor, uneducated people are not, unless they are still in hunter-gatherer societies and see problems first hand.
We often think of food and bio-products as renewables, but in many cases they are not. National Geographic (August 2016) ran a great article on the exhaustion of the Ogallala aquifer. California gets a lot of attention, but ground water is being drained globally. Longer term, there may be limits with phosphorus as well. Food production is going to become a lot more expensive, global warming or not.
I don't know about the returns, but Al Gore's Generation Investment Management philosophically probably has the right approach.
The flipside to all of this is that technology can make using the same resources much more efficient. My leading theme for the past 5+ years or so has been exponentially more efficient technology running head on in to global government policies -- of all political leanings -- of creating GDP growth at all costs. The two don't mix, and the results could be very ugly.
Unfortunately, there is something far easier and cheaper (from the end user's perspective) to duming in a controlled landfill: dumping in random places.
It's been a long battle in many places to get people to properly dispose of their trash in a proper way, it's still way too easy to revert to prior behavior. In many places in the US, people have to pay a private company for disposal or haul their trash to a landfill (usually in more rural areas). So it's a very visible cost, making savage dumping more compelling.
Ok, how do you keep people from dumping their garbage in someone else's garbage bin, or in some public place in the middle of the night?
This also doesn't really deal with the fact that different garbage has very different effects on the environment and society, and very different mass. "E-waste" frequently doesn't weigh that much, but has a lot of both valuable metals and also hazardous materials which can cause problems when dumped in a landfill. Mercury-bearing batteries are especially bad, but those don't weigh much at all. Some broken dishes, however, can easily weigh far more than old electronic gadgets or leaky batteries, but they're just pottery so they're completely inert and have zero negative environmental effects. And yard waste and kitchen waste isn't environmentally problematic at all, yet it can weigh a lot because much of it is water. It'd be better to compost it, but urban dwellers have no place to put a compost pile.
I live in Zürich. Here, you can only throw things away if they're in the proper bags, which cost about two francs for a 35 litre bag.
But taking stuff to the recycling centre is free, and there's usually one within five minutes walk of any given house.
The end result is that waste is basically self managed --- people are incentivised to recycle as much as possible and reduce waste. I remember hearing that disposal largely pays for itself, but I don't have a reference for that, so don't quote me.
Many municipals in the US have similar policies with garbage, either pay for the special bags or pay per bin. Even at a small cost this often leads to dumping. I saw someone had dumped their trash in a cemetery. :(
My dysfunctional, incompetent, and corrupt local government (In America) has managed to pick up my curbside trash once a week, for years.
Over the past year and a half, it's also managed to pick up my curbside compost. It's also managed to provide both electricity, and running water.
Most of America isn't some kind of lawless hellscape, filled with wandering ghouls, cursed with a hunger for human flesh (Despite what Randian fiction seems to claim.) Mandatory infrastructure tends to work, for some definition of working. (Now, if only the same could be said about Comcast...)
>Most of America isn't some kind of lawless hellscape, filled with wandering ghouls, cursed with a hunger for human flesh (Despite what Randian fiction seems to claim.) Mandatory infrastructure tends to work, for some definition of working. (Now, if only the same could be said about Comcast...)
About half of it is. Visit the South sometime and you'll see. A lot of places still don't have recycling, much less compost pickup.
And as for mandatory infrastructure, the entire United States fails here: internet access is mandatory infrastructure in this day and age, just like running water was considered mandatory by the mid-20th century, and the US's internet infrastructure is pathetic (as you admit about Comcast).
Most of those places in the South don't have recycling precisely because they are too busy complaining about how terrible and inefficient and wasteful their government is, and how taxes and fines harm their freedom to throw whatever they want to in the garbage. To uncharitably generalize a bit.
There's that, and the belief that environmentalism is a communist plot, and that aluminum grows on trees.
If they wanted compost pickup, there'd be no reason why they couldn't have it. When you've solved curb-side garbage pickup, you've also solved curb-side recycling pickup, and curb-side compost pickup.
San Francisco sends its (mandatory) curbside compost up to Napa to grow our wine, and having lived through a couple ballot initiatives and largely-self-infliciated absurdly high rents here, I can think of no municipality that is more dysfunctional or incompetent.
Currently companies externalize the cost of disposing their products. You and I having to pay a bigger garbage bill is not going to change the behavior of the companies making all of this trash. If it were possible to query everything that went into a landfill, and bill the entire value chain proportionally for its disposal cost, THEN we might start to have a fair system and see changes. Current incentives are to produce the cheapest thing that will barely work for long enough that someone will buy it.
In California there's a paint-use fee tacked onto the cost of a gallon of paint when you buy it.
Of course, its main purpose is to pay for programs that safely manage the disposal of unused paint (i.e. you can take your extra unused paint to paint retailers for proper disposal.) But, this price hike should, at least in theory, reduce demand for paint a little overall.
>Currently companies externalize the cost of disposing their products.
At least Nordic countries have a system which shifts this burden to manufacturers or importers of stuff. It's called "product responsibility (fee)". (Producentansvar).
Small companies are excluded, the threshold is somewhere around 1M€ per year turnover.
Not sure if there is any EU wide regulation.I wouldn't be surprised if even some U.S. states had something similar.
That's a pretty blunt instrument though. It looks like it just hits retailers, not manufacturers, and the fee is assessed regardless of whether the device ends up disposed. Seems like such a fee would serve only to make everything more expensive, instead of actually incentivizing the production of longer-lasting goods.
Another idea (probably full of holes, I'm sure): Tax manufacturers based on the length of their products' warranties, say 100 minus YEARS. So no warranty means company pays 100% of the product's sale price in tax. 5 year warranty means company pays 95% of the product's sale price, etc. down to no tax if the company offers a 100 year or more warranty.
Biggest problem I can think of there can be answered with most of the warranty repairs I've ever had done.
"We don't have any parts for your $old_thing, here, have a $new_thing"
Great from the consumer standpoint, but useless when it comes to reducing the amount of trash. And I'd be willing to bet that once something doesn't have any parts, it's not gonna be refurbished, it's gonna be scavenged for useful parts (if that's even possible), if not outright destroyed.
Right now it is profitable for many parties to extract non-renewable resources, assemble them in to something that has a short life cycle, and be sold to consumers who would rather keep buying the same thing over and over again than a single time. There have been big incentives on the government side for hitting GDP numbers, which has led to both low interest rates and an urgency to extract and process non-renewable resources as quickly as possible. Capital utilization numbers certainly doesn't account for any of this and very well exacerbate the problem.
I don't want to confuse cause and effect here, but the consumption of low quality products directly relates to the volume which they are produced. The actual costs have just been transferred to the future. In the future there will be both fewer resources to produce those goods and more pollution/ecosystem effects to account for it.
At Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder meeting this year Charlie Munger specifically said he thought all petrochemical reserves would be eventually exhausted to make things, not for fuel (there was a specific word he used which I never use and forgot.) Billionaires are thinking about resource exhaustion. Poor, uneducated people are not, unless they are still in hunter-gatherer societies and see problems first hand.
We often think of food and bio-products as renewables, but in many cases they are not. National Geographic (August 2016) ran a great article on the exhaustion of the Ogallala aquifer. California gets a lot of attention, but ground water is being drained globally. Longer term, there may be limits with phosphorus as well. Food production is going to become a lot more expensive, global warming or not.
I don't know about the returns, but Al Gore's Generation Investment Management philosophically probably has the right approach.
The flipside to all of this is that technology can make using the same resources much more efficient. My leading theme for the past 5+ years or so has been exponentially more efficient technology running head on in to global government policies -- of all political leanings -- of creating GDP growth at all costs. The two don't mix, and the results could be very ugly.