I don't hate the idea.

But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost more to get them back for multiple reasons, including products not being as neatly packaged and often going from many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies; you basically make it impossible for small companies to make complicated products. And are we including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit from economies of scale.

Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills for different types of enriched materials, and government subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of greater public interest to recycle.

I've been working on the software side of the technology needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years, waiting for some hardware advancements.

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teiferer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products

As with all economics, it's not a one-way street. A change in conditions causes a change in behavior. Increased costs will cause a change in how products are designed, manufactured, used. If one-time use cost goes through the roof, suddenly all vapes will be multi-use. Plastic bottles will disappear in favor of dispensers and multi-use bottles. Not all of them, but most of.

It's about incentives in a dynamic system, not spot bans in an otherwise static world.

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geysersam 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why would 2x the transportation cost be intractable, but ruining the environment, killing life in the oceans, destroying the basis of our future food production, etc, be tractable?

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tomcam 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products... Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies

I think 3rd parties would spring up to deal with that stuff

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__d 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Agreed. Companies could “outsource” their recycling obligations to local (national, regional, whatever) providers.

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adrianN 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe they could use big trucks that just collect all refuse from the curb. And maybe that is something that the city should do so that we don’t have a dozen trucks collecting a dozen different trash cans from every house.

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CableNinja 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That was tried, and what ultimately occured was disgusting.

The world was full of new computers popping up and every middle class or above person buying new ones like they do with iphones now. Companies started recycling programs, and many immediately went the route of corruption. They would pack up shipping containers full of ewaste, with 40-50% reusable items, and the rest junk, allowing them to skirt the rules. These containers would end up in 3rd world countries, with people standing over a burning pile of ewaste, filtering out reusable metals. There was, at one point, even images of children doing this work. The usable items were sold dirt cheap, with no data erasing, leading to large amounts of data theft, and being able to buy pages of active credit card numbers for a dollar.

We are talking about less critical things now, like vape pens, but its not a far throw for it to instantly become an actually bad idea to let other companies do the recycling. Make the manufacturer deal with it, or even the city/state, via public intake locations (like was mentioned of switzerland in another part of this thread)

	▲	teiferer 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why past tense? That's describing exacty the world we are living in right now.

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venturecruelty 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Consider that there are some things society can and should do that are independent of the profit motive, hm?

	▲	lostlogin 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The full cost of product has externalised the waste bit, and made it the customer and societies problem.