The End of Eco-Fees?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>

| Because, moving it into "cost of business" and away from "tax" is
| generally good thing, because it allows companies to do what they do
| best, ie. cut cost.  Couldn't those recyclers make deals with importers,
| manufacturers, or branch offices?  Keeping in mind that most products
| are "Made in China". :-)

It never was a tax.  It was a levy collected and used by Stewardship
Ontario, an industry group.

Currency flow is information flow.  That's good.  That's what the
market is good at, as long as the information is not distorted.

Unfortunately, it is hard to get information to flow backwards in
time.  (But that's what we do all the time: think of "futures".)
End-of-life is generally long after production.  So the cost of
end-of-life is hard to accurately reflect in prices, no matter how it
is arranged.

Stewardship Ontario seemed to just roughly break things into classes
("desktop computer", "portable computer", "printer", "mouse", etc.)
and had one price per class.  That doesn't properly incentivize
improvements in the actual product (or packaging or distribution, or
...).

The Star article isn't clear how the new system is better or even
as good as the old one.  The main change seems to be that the cost is
buried in the price.  I actually think that that is a step back if the
goal is to reduce waste.  But it will antagonize voters less, probably
the main goal.

Human psychology is funny.  The mandatory $0.05 bag charge (not tax:
it went to the retailer) was quite effective -- it seemed to cut down
bag usage by something like a half.  Before that, Loblaws had allowed
a credit of $0.02 per bag you brought but that seemed to have very
limited effect.  Fees would seem to have more effect than bonuses.

I would hypothesize that a hidden charge has much less effect than a
visible one.
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