Okay. Let’s suppose, as Mark Binker suggests in this piece, that neither Marc Basnight, nor his colleagues, nor his party received any campaign contributions (or benefitted in any way from) for the wacky environmental provision in the budget that would create a veritable bottling monopoly for the producer of "biodegradable" bottles in Winston Salem. Public Choice analysis shows that, if you follow the money, somebody will be benefitting from these kinds of Bootleggers and Baptists relationships. But again: let us suppose for the sake of argument that Marc Basnight is driven purely by someone’s crazy idea of good intentions–perhaps even his own (which would be rare for a politician). Does such a move make economic sense?
How long and by what process does such a bottle biodegrade? If it’s 100 years, so what? How much more expensive is it for people to support this legislated monopoly? While Basnight might think that random powerplays based on economically backwards whims help his state, he’s almost always wrong compared to the market. In other words, in whatever he’s trying to achieve with this legislation (which is difficult to tell), it probably won’t work in the way he hopes and may even run counter to his intentions.
For example, is he hoping that there will be fewer plastic bottles in landfills? If so, why? Isn’t he creating an incentive for people to throw them away rather than recycling them? If ordinary bottles ever become worth anything (i.e. because petroleum prices are rising), people will mine landfills for those bottles. What about the petroleum use? Oil resins for plastic feedstocks aren’t used in our cars, so it wouldn’t effect the price of gas to any appreciable degree, if at all. If you start to look at WHY he’s doing this, there really isn’t any plausible theory–plausible from the standpoint of basic economics or environmental protection.
But then again, Marc Basnight has never cared about economics. He believes he can suspend market laws with the power of enlightened legislation. He’s wrong. (That’s why I suspect we should go back to following the money.)
-Max Borders
What about the cost to the taxpayer of more expensive bottles?
Or the fact that the bottles do not just “biodegrade” on their own, they must be in an industrial composter to biodegrade.
Or the fact that they must be segregated from regular recycling. If they get thrown into recycling with normal plastic bottles, there is no benefit and it may actually do harm?
The bigger question is, why wasn’t this radical policy change ever debated by a committee or the full Senate? Why was it just included in the budget with no input or evaluation of its merits?
And then why was debate on the budget cut off before an amendment removing it be considered?
This is a very interesting piece of legislation. Max Borders makes a few compelling points. There are technologies in the market which allow plastics to be fully recycable and biodegradable.
The biodegradable I’m talking about is not chemically breaking down into smaller pieces or an industrial composting facility. Its the assimilation of the carbon atoms by microbes.
Our company ENSO Bottles, has developed a solution to plastic pollution that takes us a step in the right direction. It allows the plastics to be fully recycled along with the existing recycle stream and will naturally biodegrade into biogas and soil when exposed to a microbial environment (such as soil).
Biodegradation of our bottles in a landfill is less than 15 years. In perfect environments our bottles will completely biodegrade in under a year.
We agree with Max that the motivation of any legislation should be highly scrutinized and should never exclude technologies which we have not discovered.
To solve our worlds problems, we will need to be open to new ideas.
Learn more about ENSO Bottles at http://www.ensobottles.com
Sincerely,
Max Clark
ENSO Bottles