Comment by rapnie
11 days ago
> Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste
Anecdotal but my perception is that clothing has become so extremely low quality, and I assume dirt cheap to produce, that they have less of an incentive to let it go to waste. When I buy socks they get holes after wearing them 7 times, and then they go in the bin too.
If you can make a shirt for $1 and sell it for $10, you can throw out literally half of your inventory and still make $5 per shirt.
Update: I made a silly math mistake. That's $9 profit per shirt. So if you make 100 shirts but only sell 50 and burn the rest, that's $450 profit. You make $4.50 per shirt manufactured.
Stated another way: you can total up the manufacturing cost of the shirts you destroyed ($50) and distributed evenly among the ones you sold (50/50=$1 each) and just add that to the cost of each shirt you sell when calculating profit. Same result.
This would been that more competition would be good for the environment because it would drive down prices and margins, and thus the incentive to overproduce. But this rule actually decreases the competitive pressure and increases margins because market exit barriers = market entry barriers
If you throw some plastics into a coal fired power plant it is almost the same as if you would burn oil.
There are anecdotes about trash incinerators requiring less kerosene to finish the burn, because of the plastic content.
I have a feeling nobody is paying particularly close attention to capturing usable energy from this process
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