Joined: Dec 25, 2001 Posts: 32,399 Location: Liberty City
Posted: Tue 24th Jun 9:00am Post subject: Green Capitalism?
I've been thunking about where capitalism/ market economics falls down in regards to environmental degradation. At the moment when we pay for an item we are generally paying for how much it cost to manufacture/ deliver etc. - but not for how much it will cost to dispose of in a way that causes minimal impact to the environment.
For example, if I bought a dozen tasty bottled beverages I could do the following with the left over bottles:
a) Recycle them
b) Put them in the rubbish so they go into the landfill
c) Smash them on cycle lanes/ streets/ carparks
d) Throw them into the Heathcote River
Or if I bought a litre of diesel I could
a) Put it in a 2008 VW Bluemotion and drive 25km with bugger all toxic emissions
b) Put it in a bad tuned 1991 Nissan Terrano and drive 10km leaving a trail of soot, carcinogens and other toxic nasties behind me.
c) Pour it over the road and do burnouts - au!
d) Throw it into the Heathcote River
The main things stopping us from taking the later options is social conditioning, guilt and the slim possibility of getting caught and then getting a fine. The problem is that some people in society are quite happy to drive around in their stinking diesels hiffing bottles out of the window and they don't actually pay any more money than someone who has gone to the effort of getting a low emission car/ recycling glass etc.
So... over in South Australia they have bottle banks where you get a certain amount of money for ever bottle you bring in. This means that there is a financial incentive to not hiff them out the window/ into rivers and there's even a financial incentive to collect discarded bottles and take them to the recycling depot.
If we (for example) added $2.40 to the cost of a dozen bottles but gave you back 20 cents for every bottle returned to the recycling depot would that help clean up the environment? I think so.
And is it possible to apply this logic to everything else we consume? If people paid an amount over the top of what an item cost to manufacture which was someway refunded when it was disposed of properly/ used safely would that effectively introduce market economics into how people dispose of their parc?
What got me thinking about all of this was last year I helped my mom collect toxic chemicals for disposal (she's a scientist) from the general population and we got some real goodies. For example Cholorpicrin was used as a chemical weapon in World War One and apparently turns into a contact explosive when it crystalises(according to one of the other scientists) yet little old ladies were bringing it in as their dearly departed husbands had bought it decades ago to kill rats. To dispose of this correctly involved packaging it up very very carefully and shipping it to Europe to be incinerated in a special incinerator.
As you can imagine the cost of the exercise was substantial and carried by the central government and local council as if you tried to charge people the real cost of disposing of stuff like this they'd generally just biff it somewhere.
Joined: Aug 21, 2002 Posts: 5,057 Location: Auckville
Posted: Tue 24th Jun 9:17am Post subject:
As with most good ideas, the general public would be totally outraged at the though paying more for XYZ... So how do you trick people in realising its a good idea.
Joined: May 13, 2005 Posts: 1,692 Location: Otumoetai
Posted: Tue 24th Jun 9:18am Post subject:
Tama, you think too much for this early in the morning....
On the topic though, check out the scheme that Germany has - you can take things out of thier elaborate packaging right there at the supermarket and leave it in a certain bin and the company that produced that good must come and collect it. A mobile phone for example, with all its boxes, plastic wrappings etc etc. I forget what the scheme is called exactly, but its been running for quite some time and encourages producers to minimise their packaging, rahter than having layers of plastic over everything.
Joined: Dec 25, 2001 Posts: 7,409 Location: Wellytron
Posted: Tue 24th Jun 9:20am Post subject:
Sims wrote:
As with most good ideas, the general public would be totally outraged at the though paying more for XYZ... So how do you trick people in realising its a good idea.
Tell them that every extra dollar they spend will count towards future tax cuts?
Joined: Mar 05, 2007 Posts: 1,360 Location: 127.0.0.1
Posted: Tue 24th Jun 9:22am Post subject:
Flyboy wrote:
Tama, you think too much for this early in the morning....
On the topic though, check out the scheme that Germany has - you can take things out of thier elaborate packaging right there at the supermarket and leave it in a certain bin and the company that produced that good must come and collect it. A mobile phone for example, with all its boxes, plastic wrappings etc etc. I forget what the scheme is called exactly, but its been running for quite some time and encourages producers to minimise their packaging, rahter than having layers of plastic over everything.
Joined: Sep 04, 2002 Posts: 20,368 Location: Riding the Entertainment Mastodon
Posted: Tue 24th Jun 9:32am Post subject:
Sims wrote:
As with most good ideas, the general public would be totally outraged at the though paying more for XYZ... So how do you trick people in realising its a good idea.
There is a recent book by the behavioural economists Sunstein and Thaler on how subtle "nudges" can often achieve more than open coercion. I read an article where they discussed such incentives for green behaviour. But I agree that capitalism is the only way environmentalism will work in the long run. And phunk is right about property rights.
Last edited by E Dogg Capizzle on Tue 24th Jun 9:39am; edited 1 time in total
The entity that looks after something the best is the one who owns it. While it will never be the optimum outcome (however you define that) history shows that the best environmental record is of the 'capitalist' societies.
Then there is the strange seperation of human welbeing and the environment by the environmentalists, like there is some sort of intrinsic value in nature that is untouched by humans..
Joined: Jan 12, 2003 Posts: 31,880 Location: Derailled
Posted: Tue 24th Jun 9:45am Post subject:
Recycling in general uses more energy to re-create a product than making a new one from scratch, that is poxy, add in the cost of collection and shipping the materials and its cost the environment even more... re-use rather than re-cycle should be the mantra
Tama, you think too much for this early in the morning....
On the topic though, check out the scheme that Germany has - you can take things out of thier elaborate packaging right there at the supermarket and leave it in a certain bin and the company that produced that good must come and collect it. A mobile phone for example, with all its boxes, plastic wrappings etc etc. I forget what the scheme is called exactly, but its been running for quite some time and encourages producers to minimise their packaging, rahter than having layers of plastic over everything.
In NZ this type of scheme has been coined "product stewardship".
I remember the days when you could get paid for returning coke bottles. Made rugby games fun for kids. People these days seem to need monetary compensation for anything they do which they feel is beyond their god given right to stuff up the environment..
Joined: Dec 25, 2001 Posts: 32,399 Location: Liberty City
Posted: Tue 24th Jun 10:39am Post subject:
jeremyb wrote:
Recycling in general uses more energy to re-create a product than making a new one from scratch, that is poxy, add in the cost of collection and shipping the materials and its cost the environment even more... re-use rather than re-cycle should be the mantra
In the current economic climate with some materials maybe - but considering the predicted shortage of metals such as copper and zinc I'm sure we'll be happier in the future not having to dig through landfills to find all those cheap appliances we biffed.
Joined: Feb 09, 2004 Posts: 13,595 Location: a transit lounge in north america
Posted: Tue 24th Jun 4:05pm Post subject:
jeremyb wrote:
Recycling in general uses more energy to re-create a product than making a new one from scratch, that is poxy, add in the cost of collection and shipping the materials and its cost the environment even more... re-use rather than re-cycle should be the mantra
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