[maga_2020]

Waste is a huge problem, clearly human made, clearly responsibility to address in every current generation.

Cost of products sold must include recycling and waste management costs.

Otherwise, the manufactures will keep making devices/items with built-in-obsolescence to make it 'fashionable' for consumers to replace them at the first opportunity.

[barbazoo]

When I buy packaged groceries I often decide whether I'll buy it again based on the packaging used. And I feel like from my perspective things are getting better slowly. Lots more paper where plastic used to be, good stuff.

Now the other day I went to my ethnic neigborhood store that I usually only buy veggies from but this time I got some imported roti breads and good lord, the amount of plastic they use is just insane. It opened my eyes to the fact that probably the vast majority of the world still packages their food like there's no tomorrow. Every roti was wrapped in 2 sheets of plastic, packaged in a bag of plastic. 5 rotis in bags in another bag, 5 bags of those in the large bag you see in the store. They tasted great but I'm not going to buy them again, it's just too much garbage, most of it isn't even recyclable where I am. It's completely unreasonable what we're doing here.

[saagarjha]

I’ve seen rotis sold in grocery stores and they look almost nothing like you’d typically get in the actual country they’re imported from. I wonder if the plastic is added on to appeal to our sensibilities?

[kjkjadksj]

They need to work out a way for the costs to actually go towards targeted local cleanup operations which is no easy feat considering you need to extract them from all of society that produces trash. You'd have to create probably a new government agency that staffs cities with sufficient trash pickup. It would probably be in the billions in labor considering trash is often just as prolific in a tiny town of 400 people as it is in the big cities.

What would be perhaps more realistic is regulating packaging and other materials such that they can degrade safely in place with the assumption they will be littered and not properly recycled.

[jeltz]

In many countries it already often does. My guess is that in most of the biggest polluters it does not. Either due to corruption or lack of regulation.