| When freemarkets don't actually work well... |
[maj. 4-a, 2008|11:56 pm] |
There's a mindset in North American governments that runs like this: always punish the consumer for making the wrong choice - but never punish the businesses for offering the wrong choices.
I've been de-papering my apartment, as I do every so often, because as a reader and geek, magazines and boxes tend to accumulate fairly quickly, as do plastic bags and packaging.
Right now, there's a big angst going on about plastic shopping bags. It's pointed out, correctly, that they don't degrade quickly (average life is 500 years) and we really only use them for about 30 minutes, the average time from packing the groceries at the store to the time we put them away at home, then throw the bag away.
Clearly, there has to be a better solution. In the past, stores would deliver groceries often putting them in a single large box, which uses both paper and less of it, but that requires running a delivery service and that costs money. So the solution we now have are to ban plastic bags replacing them with paper bags or with reusable nylon shopping bags - which the shopper pays for, of course.
Let's back up for a moment. The problem with plastic bags is that they're hard to recycle and they don't decompose. There have been attempts to make fast-degrading bags, but they tend to be weaker and cost more. Oddly, we assume paper bags are better than plastic, but in fact, paper, especially the kind used in paper bags, actually has a fairly long lifespan in landfills - and takes up more volume! Of course, that can be fixed in the same way - by making the paper decomposable.
The fact remains though - that the real problem lies in how goods are packaged. Do I really need a hard drive put into an antistatic bag, in a box, in a plastic bubble, inside a bigger plastic bubble with a ton of paper wrapped around it? My laptop brought a truely surreal moment when I opened the box for the pen to find a folded paper assembly holding ANOTHER box containing another paper assembly holding the pen.
Then there's the huge blocks of shaped styrofoam. That can't be recycled. Nor can pizza boxes (paper with food on it isn't generally recyclable). But you can kill off the styrofoam with shaped bubble-plastic. Amazon uses this in place of styrofoam pellets - basically, they take a long tube of thin plastic, inflate it and heat-pinch it into balloons. When you're done, you can pop them and the entire packaging collapses into a small wad of plastic, that's recyclable.
For pizza boxes, all you need to do is LINE the box with wax paper or even just old fashioned kraft paper. That protects the box from food oils and makes it recycable. Then again, why not go further? Instead of a big cardboard box, why not just have a cardboard disk and paper sleeve? Or make a plastic box and charge a refundable fee?
Answer?
Because it's cheaper and easier to pass the problem down to the consumer.
And this is where freemarket logic kind of breaks down. The cost of making any kind of packaging that's more environmentally friendly raises the cost. A simple paper box is already as cheap and convenient as you can get, especially since EVERYONE is using the same packaging. This seriously lowers the cost. Trying anything else means specialty product and the cost goes up.
This is why *every* pizza place delivers pizza in essentially the exact same box.
And this is where the system fails. The idea is that if the consumer really cares, they'll seek out companies offering a choice of packaging they prefer, even if that choice is more expensive. Except that they don't. It's not cost effective to do that - and it requires customers to pay a penalty, which they'll resist.
The freemarket model suggests that this means that 'reducing packaging' isn't valuable enough to enough people, so the market works: the producers don't produce a product that the consumers don't want. Except that the consumers don't see the real cost, nor the possible outcome of that choice. They only see the immediate cost of the choice which is reflected in the price of pizza.
So, the government tries to fudge the books by hitting the consumer with a levy, the idea of which is to encourage the right choices... except, that it hits all consumers of all producers equally. There's no incentive for the PRODUCERS to change - especially since the odds are that they're all already at the lowest possible price now. The consumer can't choose an option that doesn't exist... and they still want pizza, so they just eat the extra price and nothing really gets better.
They SHOULD be hitting the producers with a levy that they can get out of by finding alternative packaging methods. Then their products will be cheaper than their less innovative competition and will draw customers.
But that's not how the generally pro-business governments think.
The worst example of this is the upcoming 2.5c/l levy on gas the local gov't is planning on apply to gas as a 'carbon levy'. The fact is, it's not going to have much of an effect. The price of gas has gone from 89c/l to $1.32/l in the past two years. Is 2.5c/l really going to make a difference? Worse, the levy is 'tax neutral' in that it's promised to go back to the tax payers. In other words, it serves no purpose other than to punish people who have to drive without actually providing any better options.
It's called a 'carbon tax', except that if they're returning it all back to the tax payers, then it isn't. It should be paid to low carbon industries to buy up their unusued carbon production points. They SHOULD use it to improve the road system (reducing the time cars are on the roads and thus reducing the production of greenhouse gases) or to improve the transit systems and/or reduce the bus fees and encourage people use those alternatives.
But it's easier to smack the end users who in most cases really don't have many options. |
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