5. Taxing the Disposal of Resource-Rich Consumer Items (As a Means of Incentivizing Re-Sale)

So much is thrown out that either could be of use to others but is not sold on eBay because the shipping costs etc. are too high (e.g.  old sofas), or there are too many of them available (e.g. books), some have little value here but would be grabbed up in a poor country if not for shipping costs ( e.g. five-year old computers), some cannot be sold for health reasons (e.g., food, pharmaceuticals). Creating any of these products involves tremendous use of natural resources: people plant trees, the sun and earth and rain work for years to produce them, people then chop the trees down, use energy to power the saws, and use gas to haul them, energy to chop/saw them up into boards, energy to transport them to factories where they are made into furniture, transported to stores, to the home etc. Work is put in at all stages; loggers, truckers, carpenters, salespeople etc, and then after a relatively short while it is ground to bits and left in a garbage dump to rot and turn eventually into earth. The same for a computer, a book, food.

There should perhaps be a tax on natural resources that are wasted – if the resources are used to grow food and the food is eaten, fine, but if it is thrown out …. If it used to make a couch or even a stupid toy or firewood, OK, but if the resulting product is simply discarded before a pre-determined time period then one need pay a tax…… but one cannot make it too expensive or difficult, because then people will simply try to dispose of their stuff surreptitiously….. using the system should confer an advantage.

Unfortunately it isn't economical to distribute this stuff to the people who need it, either because the equipment needs repair which is too expensive, or they are far away and transport time and effort costs too much, and storing it until a ‘needer’ is located and comes to pick it up is not economical – storage costs money, even if it is your home, you are paying rent on that space. But throwing stuff away costs money too…

One needs to have a calculation of the expenses involved in disposing of garbage not sold as landfill. For example, the land itself could instead be used for commercial purposes, the cost of hauling the garbage, including the trucks and the pensions and health benefits of the workers etc., and the cost of environmental clean-up, and health inspectors etc., etc. If people had to bear the costs directly for each sofa or refrigerator they disposed of rather than as part of municipal taxes this of course affects the costs of redistributing used stuff - but I don't know if it would affect it sufficiently significantly. (Also, there would be a cost to the bureaucracy which would be set up to assess and implement the fee for disposal..)

In an unintended way the recycling of plastic is a great idea: wealthier people do not care enough about 20 cents or a dollar to bother going to the store to get a deposit refund, while the poorest people collect the bottles and get the money, so the money goes directly from the wealthy in a voluntary tax paid directly to the poorest people, without any government intervention; if there were government involved, only a negligible percentage of the deposit money would be left for the poor after expenses and bureaucrats’ salaries! But without the government regulation about disposal, and inspectors giving fines etc, this system wouldn't work.

There should be kind of an international eBay for thrown out stuff with a financial incentive to the disposer to use this service. Just as the US government set up the Internet and then let it stand on its own, perhaps a government-organized collection, storage and inventory control facility. Instead of collecting only garbage, and plastic and paper for recycling, collect also furniture, clothing etc; and catalogue and store it. Perhaps electricians and carpenters etc hired to fix things, being paid from the profit of selling the stuff and the tax paid by those individuals and companies paying for the right to throw out stuff without recycling it.

Also, manufacturers could make some products more modular and therefore more easily fixable by second-hand purchasers, or have the components more readily usable in other ways when the product is unusable as-is (like transplanting organs from donors who died) and in return they get a tax break to cover the extra cost. The consumer might also be willing to pay more for the product knowing that there is a market for 10-year-old modular refrigerators. Of course manufacturers prefer planned obsolescence, but perhaps there is a way to make it profitable for them to benefit, e.g. by getting some percentage of the resale amount, or a rebate on their taxes based on the amounts of money generated by re-sales of their equipment etc.

I don't know if this is too big-brother but if each large item when purchased was registered to the owner, as a car would, and then if it is disposed of it is recorded, and a tax is paid for disposal, and if it is sold it is recorded, and the amount of sale is recorded and tax is paid on it. It is possible and relatively simple with high speed computers/Internet etc. but perhaps too invasive (like EZ pass and credit cards keeping records of everything) . But some creative thinking along these lines, not necessarily exactly these ideas as I write them. Every plan will have some drawback which will have some creative solution which will engender other problems which ... etc., hopefully converging to a useful solution.