Plastic Tax - The other half of the solution

As an adult, I make decisions with the environment in mind all the time.  I am that person, in thrift store clothes, driving an electric car to the bulk barn with my own jars to refill.  But I can’t do a full, plastic free shop at the grocery store.  The truth of the matter is that people, making the decision at the checkout counter is only part of the solution, one that has only been marginally successful and won’t bring about a fast enough change to respond to the biggest threat to our future that humans have ever seen.

I want to see a heavy tax placed on new, plastic pellets.  Like cigarettes, the use of new plastic should take into account the drain that their use will eventually have on our economy when eventually we are forced to take greater and greater measures to restore our polluted land, lakes and rivers.  Plastic is too cheap an option.  Let’s not make plastic the most economical solution to every problem.  There are alternatives, we are finding more every day, hemp for example and plant based packaging, but these alternatives are waiting for an economy shift in order to make them viable in the world today.

Take for example, Coca-Cola.  As one of the world's biggest contributors to plastic pollution, they are being looked to in order to take more responsibility for the waste they produce in their plastic bottles.  To respond to these claims, Coca-Cola will likely sponsor a beach clean-up and put some money into researching new packaging options, conclude that it’s not viable and we’ll be stuck at square one.  However, let’s say that Coca-Cola now had to pay twice as much for their raw materials in order to produce their line of plastic bottles…That changes things.

The best thing we could have done when plastic was starting to be used by companies in the fifties would have been to heavily restrict its production and use.   That was a mistake my grandparent’s generation made and a problem that my parent’s generation ignored.  A plastic tax, however, if implemented right now, will have ripple effect; change always comes from necessity.  Coffee pods won’t seem so convenient, polyester won’t be the only clothing you see when you walk into a store, wrapping some items in plastic just to increase its already long shelf life or to keep items together during transportation won’t make financial sense for companies to do.  We will find new ways.  We can also assume that after making this change, the next new "big thing" won’t with it produce hundreds of tonnes of waste that won’t breakdown for a thousand years.

We need to shift the paradigm.  Let’s not be another generation that looks the other way.