I semi-recently watched the documentary Plastic Earth at my local movie theater, and apparently it's part of some kind of environmental documentary series the local interest group puts on? So anyway, it's kind of funny, because you have the recycling enthusiasts who are sort of like crunchy liberal people, and then in the film you have the plastic alternative technology implementer companies, who are just like dudes playing factorio IRL.

In the discussion part of the Plastic Earth movie club, I was tentatively convinced to be in favor of the five cent plastic shopping bag tax, up from my previous attitude of being completely and utterly opposed.

It relies on various premises and details.

1. There are plastic bags in the rivers.

2. 1 is somehow bad. Maybe it's really quite bad for some reason, or maybe it's just aesthetically bad.

3. The plastic bags are from the stores.

4. It's basically impossible to stop the plastic bags from getting in the river. They're probably littered, but it's basically impossible to stop enough people from littering.

5a. Putting a tax on the bags stops so many from getting out there in the first place, so less get in the river. This claim is dubious.
  OR
5b. Putting a tax on the plastic bags is used to fund a project to clean up the rivers (continuous, ongoing).

In 5b it's basically just a standard externality tax.

Wasting time and niceness of life is the most significant cost of the program, far outweighing the 5¢. But having clean rivers also adds niceness of life.

I tried telling some of my friends about this, but unfortunately they weren't really interested, so they (as they would say) NPC'd out and started talking about paper straws instead (which are, it must be admitted, some bullshit).

Something I learned also from the Plastic Earth session is that recycling is actually purchased, in a market, as material, that is somewhat valuable. So idk why anyone would buy it and then throw it into the ocean. One man's garbage, but literally. Also, I don't know a lot about that market so who knows if the positive price situation is always true.

Another fun fact I learned from the movie and discussion group is that they've completely solved incineration in the current next gen of garbage disposal plants; it can incinerate everything completely, basically, without polluting the environment. So, that's nice :). Got that problem solved.