Now after seeing what happens when companies are given the freedom to do what they want without significant penalties, we’ve moved on to policy with regards to public services and the public itself.
We began the discussion with an overview of trash incinerators. I hadn’t realized that this type of waste disposal was at one point so common, but it makes sense. Incinerators are evidently small and cheap enough to install in every apartment building, and conveniently decrease the quantity of waste for ultimate disposal in a landfill. In addition, ash doesn’t attract rats or other pets.
But over the last half century, health standards have risen, requiring expensive new air filters for them to remain operational. As a result, incinerators have fallen out of favor (and of course this explains the historical drop in lead levels, not the end of leaded gasoline).
But not all of them have been closed – the largest in the US continues to operate under the guise of being a power plant. From the video we watched, it seems that the Detroit incinerator survived due to the side-benefit of power production, as well as being cheaper in the short run for the city. Although a long-run alternative to the incinerator might be cheaper and more productive for Detroit, it would require setting up landfills and recycling programs, and generally disrupt the status quo for a city with few resources.
In addition, the operators of the incinerator certainly stand to lose if it is shut down – and they’ve had twenty years to influence members of the city government. This seems like a situation where the state or federal government should provide loans to invest in a greener form of disposal, but nothing will be done unless the city government decides it wants to make the change.
In a similar vein, the MTA makes little note of studies suggesting a link between time in subway platforms and steel particle exposure. The administrators of the MTA know that even if they convince the NYC government to give them money to improve health standards, announcing this new-found risk of riding the subway could decrease ridership. Such an event , even if it wasn’t economically bad for the city, would decrease revenues to the MTA and ultimately might force them to reduce pay or downsize. So employees to the institution have a vested interest in keeping ridership high.
So government as well as business is susceptible to corruption and short-sightedness, but only because both of these institutions are made up of people. Most people are much more focused on their day-to-day existence than in saving the earth. Even more than that, because each person contributes such in such a small way to the whole of human waste production, it’s incredibly hard to assign personal responsibility to the decision to throw out a soda can or hold onto it the entire walk home.
So the can/bottle deposit is an example of good government. It presents an incentive to recycle, where before it was a matter of personal satisfaction. Although the value of the deposit has gone down with inflation, it is still high enough to be economically viable. We talked about how the destitute collect recyclables from trash cans, but I know from personal experience that some businesses do recycling explicitly for the deposit as well. Something I’m going to look into soon is how much the proportion of cans and bottles that are turned in for a deposit has changed over time.
