[bscphil]

> I suspect that zero waste is a weak/negative value proposition.

This is probably because the social / environmental cost of leaving all the trash you create in a landfill forever is an externality - you don't pay for it with your milk cartons and individually plastic wrapped potatoes. One way of thinking about the environmentalist movement is that it's an individualistic effort to price in one's own externalities, since American society more broadly is unable or unwilling to do this.

Of course broadly these efforts aren't going to solve the waste problem - if they could, manufacturers would not have the incentive to sell products this way - but there will always be a niche market for this sort of thing.

[rcme]

Are landfills really an externality? You pay for them through property taxes. They're regulated not to leech harmful chemicals into the environment. Their harmful emissions, like methane, generally come from food waste, which has nothing to do with the landfill itself.

[bscphil]

The property tax you pay doesn't cover the externalities of the landfill - it pays for trash pickup and (roughly) opportunity cost for the land being used as landfill, as well as landfill maintenance required by regulations.

Probably the biggest externality here is the environmental cost of producing all the single use plastic containers in the first place, but the landfill itself will have externalities too.

Eventually, the rate of semi-permanent waste creation by humans on Earth will have to equilibrate with the rate at which semi-permanent waste is absorbed by the environment. Otherwise, the amount of waste would continue to increase indefinitely. We can certainly go a very long time at our current rate of waste creation, which is why the costs to future-people isn't included in the price. But those costs are real, and potentially include making sure chemical leeching doesn't occur over hundreds or thousands of years, not just decades.

[rcme]

> But the landfill itself will have externalities too.

Such as? As I mentioned, landfills are already regulated to prevent leeching harmful byproducts into the environment and many of the harmful things produced by landfills that do escape, e.g. methane, isn't really specific to the landfill itself.

[asdajksah2123]

There is no signaling mechanism to indicate their cost to the consumer.

Your entire block might switch to zero waste and would likely see no reduction in their property taxes (any reduction would probably simply reduce the local government's deficit).

[rcme]

Local governments don’t generally run deficits (in the US). And there definitely is a price signaling mechanism. If trash becomes more expensive to dispose of, that cost is passed on to consumers via higher taxes.

[akira2501]

> There is no signaling mechanism to indicate their cost to the consumer.

Where is this true? In every jurisdiction I've ever lived in trash service has been private and I've had to pay for it myself. The service fee is based on volume of trash container. I've always had direct feedback on trash disposal costs.

[bravo22]

There is no limit on the waste, and therefore no market. It is an arbitrary price placed by politicians. Imagine if oil prices were not dicated by a market and a by a production cartel rather by politicans in the US.

[bradleyjg]

One way of thinking about the environmentalist movement is that it's an individualistic effort to price in one's own externalities, since American society more broadly is unable or unwilling to do this.

Nah. If this was what was going on we’d expect to see a lot more substitutions, offsets, and so on.

Instead the focus seems to be on personal virtue vis-a-vis the environment and particularly public demonstrations of personal virtue, rather than in maximizing effectiveness.

For example, why is residential rooftop solar being built out in the Pacific Northwest?

[xyzelement]

I totally get that. The question is - will enough people give a shit / buy in.