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lend000today at 4:58 AM4 repliesview on HN

I don't hate the idea.

But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost more to get them back for multiple reasons, including products not being as neatly packaged and often going from many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies; you basically make it impossible for small companies to make complicated products. And are we including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit from economies of scale.

Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills for different types of enriched materials, and government subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of greater public interest to recycle.

I've been working on the software side of the technology needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years, waiting for some hardware advancements.


Replies

teiferertoday at 6:31 AM

> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products

As with all economics, it's not a one-way street. A change in conditions causes a change in behavior. Increased costs will cause a change in how products are designed, manufactured, used. If one-time use cost goes through the roof, suddenly all vapes will be multi-use. Plastic bottles will disappear in favor of dispensers and multi-use bottles. Not all of them, but most of.

It's about incentives in a dynamic system, not spot bans in an otherwise static world.

geysersamtoday at 7:05 AM

Why would 2x the transportation cost be intractable, but ruining the environment, killing life in the oceans, destroying the basis of our future food production, etc, be tractable?

tomcamtoday at 5:11 AM

> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products... Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies

I think 3rd parties would spring up to deal with that stuff

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venturecrueltytoday at 5:11 AM

Consider that there are some things society can and should do that are independent of the profit motive, hm?

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