Monday, October 19, 2020

yeah, they tell you that shifting the costs will spur innovation, but it will probably lead to less items being recyclable, as producers realize it's cheaper to make products you have to put in the trash. 

recycling is a public service, like health care or firefighting. you just create a market failure when you try to privatize it, which is underlying parts of the problems that already exist around it - people won't make the right choices due to cost barriers. so, you need to take the market out of the issue altogether, not pretend you can adjust to it.

we consequently need more regulation here, not less - more enforceable instructions, more government inspections, etc and not bound-to-fail attempts to "spur innovation" that will, in the end, just lead to greater landfill volume.

for that reason, i'd rather the province take over recycling from the municipalities, and levy an increase in corporate taxes to pay for it. that way, the government remains in control of what is a public service and costs are shared across the business sector, rather than dumped on any specific actor.

the draft looks fairly thin, and largely adopted from the previous government's guidelines, but it shouldn't be surprising that i'd consider it too deficient to deem salvageable - we need a complete overhaul, but in more or less the exact opposite direction.