[rumcajz]

I was looking for an intro on economics of reuse the the other day but I haven't found anything useful.

So, for example, if law allowed only for a small number of different container types (to turn them into a commodity) and then taxed production of those containers heavily, what exactly would happen?

Naively, one would expect companies to cut costs by buying second-hand containers rather than buying expensive new ones.

That would create a market for used containers. For an ordinary person it would be very much like deposit: Buy stuff with the price of container included, then sell the container to get back the money.

It would, obviously, provide a new way to cheat: Produce new containers and sell them as used ones, thus avoiding the tax. But that's just a tax avoidance trick and could be dealt with using the existing anti-tax-avoidance mechanisms.

It would be interesting to know what would be the unintended consequences of such a law.