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I think this is a better way to handle it than charging a fee for the styrofoam. If you want to get rid of something, get rid of it.
Seattle's version of reducing plastic grocery bags was to tax or fee them. Maybe cuz Freedom, I dunno. So stores started charging a small amount per plastic bag. Eventually they also charged it for paper bags. After a few years bring-your-own-bag got popular and some stores dropped the paper and only offer the plastic, which they charge the fee for. The city created a new employee position to oversee the plastic bag fee collection program. So we got one more government employee and didn't get rid of the plastic bags. Spectacular success, hooray environment!
It is a success though.
For me personally, I find 10¢ bags cheaper than spending $10 at Amazon or whatever, they’re more compact, and I do reuse them
The point is they didn't get rid of the plastic, they just put a price on it. Kind of like letting people pay 50 cents to drive alone in the carpool lane that was put there to encourage carpooling and thereby reduce pollution.
You probably get most of the benefit by implementing the less severe variant of the policy - i.e. add a tax instead of banning it. I believe sales of plastic bags basically plummeted in Sweden after we introduced such a tax, and people who forget/otherwise don't have their reusable bag with them can still get one in a pinch.
The bags people get in a pinch could be paper though, but they're plastic. And here the newer plastic grocery bags have been beefed up for multi-use, so they're much more sturdy (i.e. contain much more plastic). I've seen multiple comments that "nobody reuses them". I don't know about that, but since I have cloth bags and only get those in a pinch, I don't need them for reuse so I use them as garbage bags just like I used to use the old flimsy ones that aren't available anymore, and I'm sure a lot of people do the same - including people who don't want to bother with the whole reuse thing or think it's too woke or communist or whatever. The end result is even more plastic going into the landfill than before. I think it would be smarter to just switch to paper.
I dought a government could just out right ban something, because "freedom" like you say.
Though the action of taxing something is IMO preferred, especially for a government. It allows people, or corporation's, to still attain or use a product, but they need to be willing to pay the costs. (ie. Freedom & Capitalism)
The only thing i would change is the amount of tax. Paying a few cents for a plastic bag as a example is still "cheeper" in a one time cost for a consumer, then buying a reusable bag or paper bag. And that plastic material is still cheep enough for manufacturer to buy, create the bag, and sell it at a profit.
Tax for polluting materials should be equivalent to both the "true cost" and the "external costs", such as environmental costs and public health costs. These are a little harder to quantify but should be accounted for.
This means if a company wants to use plastic or some other material for bottled water it needs to pay the full costs of said material or choose to use something "cheeper" like glass (after accounting for the tax on plastics).
This would work similar to how counties enact tariffs on imported goods. And yea it would probably mean items would become more expensive as plastic is pretty light compared to glass meaning higher fuel/transportation costs.
Styrofoam food containers are now banned in Oregon.