Tax on plastic could provide subsidy to solve crisis

To The Daily Sun,

As a boy of about 10-12, I remember riding my bike slowly along the road I lived on looking for glass bottles. I could get a few cents for them at the grocery store downtown which converted to a 10-cent candy bar or a 25-cent ice cream! My roadside stayed pretty clean.

As I walk along beaches today, I often think about how nice it would be if every child or adult beachcomber was looking for another ounce or two of washed-up plastic which they could redeem for some reward. Perhaps even the homeless and hungry would contribute. The trashed beaches and roadsides would become mines!

To make this happen, there needs to be a big worldwide change. Plastic is made from oil and coal. It did not exist when I was a boy. So often now we see pictures of choked turtles, dead whales killed by bellies full of trash, beaches in the Far East so choked with plastic trash it would be difficult to swim.

There needs to be a worldwide incentive to recapture plastic and repurpose it safely if we are to solve this huge worldwide problem. Would an incentive to invent uses for recycled plastic stimulate a market which would reward the small boys and beachcombers? I would vote for someone who would support such an approach. Though I generally disapprove of subsidies, one that temporarily stimulated private enterprise to be creative I would support.

So, what would create a world in which waste plastic was worth collecting? There would need to be a demand for it as a cheaper raw material than fossil fuels. Wow! That might mean we left that fossil fuel in the ground where it belongs!

Developing a product or a process which would use plastic waste instead of oil or coal would need risky investments but, if successful, rewards. A stimulus motivating such risk-taking would need to come from somewhere. Large foundations with environmental agendas might be a source if the concept proposed looked promising. In Utopia, this might happen!

It seems obvious that we have a worldwide crisis! We can’t wait. A temporary subsidy funded by a specially targeted tax, such as on products wrapped or contained in plastic, is an approach available to every government worldwide. The proceeds of such a tax should create a fund to be used to award grants or prizes to entrepreneurs that would create a market for the waste plastic. Such a tax should end when this market started solving our problem.

We should ask candidates for public office if they would support creating such a fund. Considering the huge number of items so packaged, the tax might be hardly noticeable. Products packaged in reusable containers could be taxed at a lower rate than those in single-use plastic to encourage repurposing. But all plastic containers eventually end up as trash. We can and must do better than this!

Gunnar Baldwin

Thornton