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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Closed loops are a pretty steep expectation. I’m pretty sure (with no evidence to back me up) with the amount of importers, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers in the supply chain for a product on a shelf, it would be a costly proposition to attempt closed loop.

    More costly than using a system of levys to promote behavioural change. Which is the idea behind the system i’s suggesting in the previous comment.

    Its about changing the system for the better to generate the fewest negative externalities possible. If a closed loop increases costs more than a system of levys, then everyone will be squeezed more than necessary to get the same result, making negative externalities, like black markets, fraud, more likely than they need be.

    Cigarettes in Australia are a great example of this in action. There is a black market for Cigarettes here because they are so expensive from the retailers, but the barriers to widespread black market adoption are still perceived as too high for the greater majority of smokers. The result is a small black market, which will almost always exist for any product you can think of, but the government has tightened the screws on smokers in the public market to make it as uncomfortable process as possible for the sale and purchase of Cigarettes. Until the introduction of younger generations vaping, and the lack of younger generations similar experiences with Cigarettes ill effects, the policy position led to a hard disincentive that worked to decrease smoking rates. But, as always, time and creativity need a reaction that we are still trying to get right.


  • A better system is to require all grocery/food/packaging, customer facing retailers to record all sales and from which suppliers those products were bought.

    Then charge the retailer the average cost of ‘recycling’ or ‘to the planet’, or another measure of cost.

    This will increase costs on all products, but by design more on the costs of hard to recycle goods and packaging.

    Charge retailers that daily, watch end to end, from supplier/producer to consumer, behaviour change and iterate accordingly.

    Start off with an industry sector though, like grocery stores, most are bricks and mortar, and have high brand acknowledgement so can’t easily escape regulation. The key is to charge the location of sale, not the companies ‘HQ’.