Or we could price cleanup and recycling of the constituent materials into the purchase price by requiring manufacturers to pay to recycle all the items they manufacture.
This approach closes the loop in a way which encourages manufacturers to re-engineer their products to be less expensive to recycle.
Cleanup is impossible though. How are you going to clean up a trillion nanoplastic dust particles? What is the effective difference between phasing out fleece clothing vs charging $100M for a jacket?
If $100M is what it would cost to internalize the economic externalities of fleece then that is the true fair price of the item. Anything less than that is a subsidy
We are subsidizing these materials with our health and our environment. And it affects certain people more than others—usually people who have the least say in it
A 100% linen shirt currently costs around $40 and, when cared for properly, can last a lifetime. Rubber bands made out of natural rubber are much stronger and will last at least 10x as long as plastic ones and are about the same price. I could go on, but the alternatives exist and are already often much cheaper in the long run.
$100M is certainly an overestimation and some types of pollution are more solvable than others. In general I think it's important for price tags to communicate the full price of an item
Also no need for the patronizing comment. Economic externalities are a valid criticism of market failures and you haven't provided the more convincing, "advanced economics" jargon-laden analysis you're pretending to harbor
> $100M is certainly an overestimation and some types of pollution are more solvable than others. In general I think it's important for price tags to communicate the full price of an item
In theory, I agree with you, but trying to internalize these cost is itself extremely costly. That's why the criticism about econ-101 level reasoning: it's a convincing idea in theory that isn't tractable at all in practice and can only end up with a bureaucratic nightmare.
The EU has many such rules that are designed around economics first principle like that, in order to build an “efficient market”, and they are all extremely burdensome and at the same time ineffective (see EU-ETS, the single Electricity market, CBAM, etc.)
In the realm of policies, tractability is always preferable to theoretical elegance.
The original comment was talking about cleanup costs. You realistically can not clean up shed microplastics. A fleece jacket sheds millions of them every wash as well as just wearing it. How are you meant to collect all of those microplastics that just blew off in to the air.
So just a blanket "Charge everything based on it's cleanup costs" doesn't work.
Same way you do asbestos remediation. Enclose the area, filter the air, create a clean room around the entire area.
Maybe in the future you laser-atomize every spec that floats past the actor inside an 8ft cube. Who knows?
I don't think it'd be practical to switch overnight - much of our societal infrastructure needs re-engineering for sustainability which will take time - perhaps a gradually increasing percentage of externalized costs can be integrated over time. It'd be real progress toward a Venus Project style resource based economy.
One includes freedom and creates an economic incentive for the development of environmental rehabilitation, recycling, and carbon negative technologies.
If some celebrity wants to single-handedly fund the development of a microplastics recovery technology as part of a red carpet fashion item, I'm OK with that.
The problem with this is it doesn't give any consideration to the feasibility of alternatives or timelines to change things. If you just drop a blanket "every product must include it's cleanup costs", you're telling the public that their current life essentials are now unbelievably expensive.
Vs selectively picking products which have easy alternatives and providing phase out periods which match the difficulty of replacing them. If you tell the public you are going to make car tires cost millions of dollars, you'll be voted out. If you tell them that plastic confetti will be replaced with paper confetti in 12 months you'll make real progress.
This doesn't prevent innovation. Scientists will still do research, develop new recycling tech and processes.
The trouble is that the market allocation of funding is dependent on the valuation of goods and services. Until the externalized costs are accurately represented, the market will under-allocate capital toward solving the problem. To push the transition to happen faster without internalizing costs, you'd have to subsidize development with significantly more cash than the market would be willing to allocate with accurately internalized costs. Which I'm not sure is possible.
There are definitely reasons to subsidize some products - medical devices, for instance - as you say, things without readily available alternatives. I'm not writing a detailed transition plan here, just pointing out observations.
This approach closes the loop in a way which encourages manufacturers to re-engineer their products to be less expensive to recycle.