[davinic]

It wouldn't be. Forcing the producers to pay for their externalities will also make some products like bottled water cost-prohibitive to sell in glass bottles and reduce demand or increase packaging sizes to more is bought in reusable plastic carboys, etc. "Reduce" is more important than reuse or recycle and while there is an obvious need for cheap bottled water, probably at least 80% of plastic disposable water bottles do not need to be sold in that way.

[R0b0t1]

But how much other economic activity are you limiting and what other products are affected? For example, what about plastic for prototyping and engineering use? Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum?

The issue is I can't see any of these restrictions accurately reflecting cost. If they could these things would not be a concern.

Any of these suggestions that apply only within a national market are also ineffective, as by their very nature they are going to reduce economic activity in that nation... which will be picked up by someone else who doesn't care. The laws need to take this into account.

[Rayhem]

> Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum?

The post above you didn't suggest using higher impact materials like brass and aluminum, they suggested making manufacturers pay for externalities which would be the case for plastics or metals.

[R0b0t1]

Nothing happens in a vacuum. You could very easily end up incentivizing worse behavior by misjudging what the externalities actually are and their impact.

Do you remember how telephone fraud with blue boxes was prosecuted? The stolen time was judged at full sale value of the minutes. But this doesn't make any sense, as if the call could not be placed for free it would not have happened, and if no one else was in line to place a call there was not lost revenue.

It seems like people are trying to do this with e.g. unrecycled plastics. Recycling is expensive likely because it is not economically productive, not because people are freeloading. The bar for showing otherwise should be very high.