the economics of my blood down the sink
drawing blood
I stand at the sink watching my own blood, mixed with running cold water, swirl around the sink a second or two after feeling the sharp plastic edge cut into my thumb. This is modern life now.
I am washing out an empty yoghurt pot to make it ready for putting out in the recycling bin. It was a 500g pot, so each time I fill it with water, that's half a litre of water used. I pay for my water use of course, it's metered, so I pay to make the pot ready for recycling, and sometimes not just with water. With the razor edges where the foil pot lid tears off from, blood is sometimes shed too.
Not for the first time, I stand there with a bloody thumb dripping in the sink and start to think about how wrong this all is.
the economics
The people selling me the yoghurt made a profit. So did the the wholesale seller of yoghurt to where I bought it. And the people who made the pot made a profit when they sold the packaging solution to the yoghurt manufacturer. And finally, the producer of the plastic that the packaging manufacturer made the pot with made a profit.
Even the bloody Government got their VAT from my Low Fat.
And I pay for the water to wash it out with when it's empty, to go into the recycling. And sometimes I bleed too. Nobody else has paid money, or blood, before me. They've all covered their costs and made money.
And yet I also pay more than that, through my local authority taxes. Because my local authority collects the pots and gathers everyone's plastic up and, in the best case scenario recycles it in a special facility they paid for (that really I paid for with my taxes).
Or, in the medium case scenario, burns it in a special facility that makes energy out of it that they pay for using (that really I pay for with my taxes) that converts the plastic to energy but still emits some unwanted stuff to the atmosphere. All within regulations for emissions of course, as monitored by the completely unbiased Environment Agency bit of the Government that is trying to hit net zero targets.
Or worst case scenario, ship it off to another country on the quiet and stick their fingers in their ears singing lalalala about what happens to it after that, and I pay for it with scenes of horrendous but a mystery plastic pollution on show in seemingly unconnected parts of the world to me (and they still tax me).
conclusion
I always come to the same conclusion, which is this is all ass about face. The people making profits from every stage before it gets to me, who did the profitable work of producing the package, selling it, filling it and selling it, and then selling it to me, should be the ones paying for recycling.
Not just making the money with absolutely no consequences, or responsibility for dealing with what they brought into the world in the first place.
Or better really, working out how to let me buy a product that doesn't need plastic in the packaging at all, which I'm sure they would do a lot faster if they knew that it would cost them money to do so if we taxed the whole fucking process before it gets to the consumer properly.
But all I can do at the moment, after thinking all that, is put a plaster (I've paid for) on my thumb.
Link for further info on a similar Energy from Waste facilities to those our local authority use. https://www.viridor.co.uk/decarbonisation/
post link for sharing: https://skryblans.com/the-economics-of-my-blood-down-the-sink
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