brixtonbrood

The idea behind this is that if we didn't use plastic we wouldn't keep the oil required in the ground.
The reason why plastic is bad in landfill is that it does degrade releasing methane that must be vented to the atmosphere (a worse greenhouse gas than CO2) and which also makes the landfill site unstable. If all landfill was inert inorganic material we could call it ballast and sell it as foundations.
The important issue is how much energy it takes to produce. For recyclable packaging this includes the amount to harvest, in the case of corn starch the fertilizers they use, the processing and the rest. In the case of plastic also the energy to mine it. This is a very complicated calculation but fortunately the market provides us with a useful abstraction - price. To save the environment use the cheapest packaging material.

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But the price does not curently reflect the disposal costs, unless the EU have already extended their car/computer type legislations to this field.

I'm a great believer as the market defining efficiency, but it only works given true lifecycle costs. In any area involving oil and agricuture, there are huge hidden subsidies, up to Bush's Iraq War costs, and its very hard to factor those into factory gate costs.

Cheap in plastic bag terms can also mean catastropic failure, and one bottle of fine wine dropped on the garden path makes all other calculations moot.

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"I'm a great believer in the market defining efficiency, but it only works given true lifecycle costs." surely => "I'm not a great believer in the market defining efficiency", as in the real world it's never possible for it to accurately reflect these costs.

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The role of government is to influence the market through taxation. As taxation is inevitable, it should be used creatively to control the overall impact of the economy on the environment. This is why I'm in favour of recycling legislation and carbon taxes.

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Absolutely, that's why I was questioning your suggestion that the market "works" in any real-world meaningful sense.

If you're saying "the market 'works', but only if government is vigorously distorting it", it seems to me that is really saying "OK, well actually maybe the market doesn't really work very well".

I think this new-Labour-ish notion that the market can be made to be fluffy and socially beneficial, provided the right fiscal carrots and sticks are applied, is one to be very wary of. Sometimes actual brute-force regulation is required. Take the example of voiding pollutants into rivers. You don't want to tax companies' profits more highly so the country can afford to clean rivers up after they've been polluted: you want to prevent them from doing it in the first place, and fine them heavily if they breach that regulation.

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You don't want to tax companies so others can clean up their pollution, you want to make it in the companies best interest to reduce pollution. This can be done by regulation and fines, or by offering tax incentives for cleaner practices. The former encourages secrecy and evasion, the latter encourages companies to say, 'look at my fragrant outflow water, give me the money'.

Unlike people who need sticks, capitalist companies work best with carrots

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Heh, that's exactly what those people say who've been proclaiming that the corporation is actively psychopathic, although they have a rather different spin on it.

It's not morally right for individual people to demand rewards for refraining from selfishly harming others: rather, they expect punishment if they do so. Why should it be the other way round for businesses? This is an integral part of the social contract whereby we mutually agree to cooperate socially in exchange for individually restricting our behaviour. It seems to me that businesses should be treated as party to that contract, not as external to it.

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Businesses are amoral. The only thing that should matter to them is to maxmimise shareholder value while remaining within the law. I would phrase company law in financial rather than moral terms, so they had one goal rather than several. I don't imposing moral burdens on boards of directors, as concepts like corporate manslaugter get very messy.

Much better to say "if your company obeys these financial rules, it will implicitly obey moral ones", than try to apply moral rules directly.

The social contract people obey is not couched in monetary terms for serious offences, but there is no way of restricting liberty for a company, so it is very hard to apply the same rules to such disparate bodies

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But all that stems from the way that we have allowed companies to be set up, rather than being inherent properties of business-conducting entities.

It would be perfectly possible to change company law such that the company was no longer a "person" in its own right, but instead its owners and directors were mutually responsible for its actions in the same way that they are for their own as individuals. This has always been the case for partnerships and for sole traders -- and partnerships are among the most successful and profitable businesses in the country.

The argument has been that freeing entrepreneurs from legal responsibility by allowing limited-liability companies allows them to be more imaginative and flexible in creating wealth. But it's by no meas apparent that this is actually a good thing for society in general, if in practice it means that they take every opportunity to screw everyone else over, and we spend half our time frantically legislating to channel their greed into the least harmful patterns, and to stay ahead of their armies of well-paid accountants, lawyers and other such continually pushing at loopholes.

I think "if your company obeys these financial rules, it will implicitly obey moral ones" is doomed to failure, because unless there is a genuine moral incentive, the company will always be trying to sneak around the financial rules -- and it has more skill at evading them than we do at framing them.

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I'm really not a fan of big companies but they are owned by shareholders, often pension funds so utimately far too many individuals too far separated from the company to make prosecution an effective deterrent. Directors and managers can be prosecuted already.

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I worry about mutual accountability, as the owners of the company are the widely dispersed shareholders, and directors are a slippery bunch.

I think financial incentives relate much better to the purpose of a company than moral ones, and its easier to bring it to task over the balance sheet than breaking a myriad of laws.

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financial incentives relate much better to the purpose of a company than moral ones

Mm, sure, but that's because its purpose is currently narrowly defined in terms of making money. I think we ought to redefine its purpose such that its articles of association must also include signing up to a wider social responsibility.

Sure the owners are widely dispersed, but so are eg. the partners in John Lewis, or the members of the Cooperative Bank, who are already being held to a much tougher responsibility than shareholders are. If those two businesses behave badly, their owners accept that they are responsible. And, it seems to me, because of this more responsible ownership pattern, those businesses are already less likely to behave badly than are companies where the owners can just rake in the profits from wrongdoing while the executives can get away with it, and entirely wash their hands of it when they're caught.

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True cost to buy generally does not reflect disposal cost but for packaging this must be small. You get a huge number of bags/hectare metre of landfill.

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sparkymark.livejournal.com

I've been assuming the triangle of arrows on Marks and Spencers ready meals bases means the plastic can go in the plastic bottle bank. Are M+S recyclable (yeah I know reduce and reuse are better...) already, but not Sainsbury, or Sainsbury going one step better?

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M&S are recyclable: Sainsbury's new thing is biodegradeable. So you just bung it in your compost bin. Whether this is actually environmentally better than recycling the plastic or not, I don't know.

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The economics of bag production are determined by feedstock, processing and distribution costs. Feedstock can be obviously renewable or not, like oil, or have muddied waters, like cornstarch which may be organic or have large petrochemical input. Trees are more obviously organic, but the processing costs and distribution costs are much higher, because you need much thicker paper bags.

There is no incentive on bag manufacturers to encourage reuse, so they design for single trip. Only consumers can push for reuse, aided by government incentives like taxing bags or feelgood schemes like supermarket penny-back schemes.

After use, some bag types can be re-used as feedstock, but too wide a range of chemicals could destroy the scheme. If starch bags contaminate the oil bag feedstock, then even 10% market penetration of starch bags could desstroy the recycling effort, and lead to increased, not decreased landfill. (I've no idea whether the chemicals do this, but its the classic brown bottle in clear glass bin issue)

If consumers know the bag's provenance, they can compost at home, as a good alternative to recycling, as compost bins and wormeries produce little methane, I think. Putting in the wrong bags could be nasty though.

Once they go to landfill, stable bags lock up carbon, which is good, but the landfill fills up. Bags that rot to CO2 have some greenhouse effect, but a bigger problem is landfill conditions encourage methane production, which is a much worse greehouse gas (but a good fuel if tapped off)

Other bags end up scattered round the streets, and then you want them to rot, and they will form CO2 rather than methane.

Bags are a classic for the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (and here Rot) mantra. The earlier items are the most important, so I'd choose minimalist packaging or where you can bring your own.

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If starch bags contaminate the oil bag feedstock

If the starch bags biodegrade fully, though, as is claimed, then all they need to do is leave the mixed bags sitting around for a bit and they will then become pure oil-based.

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But then you have increased storage costs and the danger of methane if piled in the wrong kind of heap.

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The energy used to make petrochemical plastic bags is (IIRC) actually greater than the energy "embodied" within them. Whether that's much different for cornstarch bags, I don't know.

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