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Make the recycling deposit a dollar, pin it to inflation, and put it on everything.
That would probably also solve overconsumption, since you could only buy so much of anything before literally running out of dollars to deposit.
That would make having a mountain of long lived useless trash a solid inflation safe investment plan.
Can’t wait to start counterfeiting milk jugs
As long as their useless trash is in their garage and not scattered on the highway I think that's still an improvement.
Even if it was scattered everywhere you would definitely have people pick it back up for the deposit. That works with bottles in Germany and the deposit for them gets as low as 8ct.
Why would it be inflation safe?
Because the deposit is tied to inflation. Older products might end up with way outdated deposits if you print the sum on the packaging, so it would have to be token based. The token is then inflation safe.
It seems trivial to tie the token to a sale date. The future deposits on future purchases will keep pace with inflation because the deposits will increase, but you only get back the deposit you put in at time of purchase.
Even if the deposit on bottles is $2 in 2035, if you bought when they were $1 they won't accrue value by sitting in your garage.
And how exactly would you do that? One giant database of sales that everyone just has access to? Print it on the thing at time of sale? I can't see any trivial solution, I'd be interested in yours tho!
I don't see why everyone needs access, it could just be kept with the Department of Energy (or whoever would be in charge of the proposed universal deposit program). Accessing it would require a court order, just like digging through someone's trash.
Although that said, an open database of every single purchase would have all sorts of uses!
For instance, if someone litters, the authorities could track the unique code to the purchase and then... well. 🙂
If you want to sell a product you would have to register that deposit in the database, similarly if you get it back you have to access the database to know how much to pay out. If you don't want to limit selling products to large businesses everyone needs access.
Sure, consequences for littering are fun and all, but the passive surveillance that allows is terrifying imho.
Do you think that kind of surveillance isn't already happening with credit card companies, online shopping, and chain stores?
Oh, no. I'm quite aware. The companies that can do it have a large enough effect in my life as it is. I really do not wish for scammers, random trolls, foreign government or home invader (tracking where you are based on purchases) to join them.
Right now I can make it hard for the big players by using the right tools and services. This would make it completely impossible.