Why don’t we ask for better from our businesses? Corporations dump metric megatons of poisonous junk and hazardous waste into our lives every year. We pay them for it, use it, and then foot the bill for cleaning it up afterward. Does that make sense to you? A lot of our junk isn’t terrible, but some of it is really, really noxious. Why don’t we expect – or, better, demand – more responsible manufacturing, especially for the most hazardous materials? Imagine living in some magical alternative world where everything we buy includes the cost of cleaning it up. Wouldn’t that be nice? Because right now, we’re subsidizing the worst kind of soulless capitalism.

My Morning Coffee

This started with my Nespresso machine. Swear to god. I love strong espresso. I used to own grinders and good espresso machines. After the cost of finding and buying good coffee beans, there’s the grinding, warming and brewing my cup or two of espresso. It took time, but I knew that before I started. But once I was finished brewing, I had to empty and clean the coffee brewing pieces before the coffee acids etched the metal. By the time I was done dumping, cleaning and wiping, my coffee was cold. That kind of spoiled the point.

I avoided pod-based coffee because the pods seemed hugely wasteful compared to brewing my own. But now, I make guilt-free Nespresso coffee every day. Why no regrets? (Other than being overcaffeinated, I mean.) First, Nespresso makes a great cup of coffee. But just as importantly for me, Nestlé includes an excellent recycling program in the price of their pods. (I know. Nestlé? But I researched it to be sure.) Used pods are just coffee grounds and aluminum, so recycling them in bulk makes sense. Better, Nestlé includes recycling in the purchase price. I pay for it once. I pack up the spent pods and either bring them into a store or mail them in a (postage-paid) UPS pack. Zip, zop, and done: not much waste, good compost, recycled aluminum, and some happy, jittery people.

Why Not Responsible Manufacturing?

The arguments for responsible manufacturing are easy. What are the arguments against including all the costs in the price? That it’s too hard for corporations to set up? Poor babies. And no, that’s nonsense.

Is the problem that including all the costs would make their products too expensive? If Duke Energy, Big Agriculture, and Big Oil create enough damaging and poisonous crud that these multibillion-dollar corporations can’t deal with the costs, then maybe we should start asking some basic questions. At least help clean it up? At the very, very least, please don’t dump the pollution costs into nearby streams, the air, underground aquifers, the oceans, and bankrupt shell corporations?

When I buy an HP printer, what happens to the carcass when it’s obsolete in a year? Or my old TV with all those exotic chemicals? How can Google, Apple, Samsung, Pixel, and others insist I buy a new phone every couple of years and yet offer no plans for the old ones? There’s some nasty stuff in those shells. Are we actually happy burying all that stuff in landfills?

Recycling

Surprised me that the fashion industry (clothing and shoes) was such a big polluter. There’s the creation side, of course. We dedicate lots of cropland to cotton (which exhausts the soil, so include petroleum-based fertilizer). Add a splash of plastic for polyester and shoe parts. Then there’s the bleaching, dying, weaving, and assembly byproducts and waste. But the biggest problem is waste after the purchase. The entire reason fashion exists is to make your wardrobe obsolete as quickly as possible. We throw out over 11 million pounds of textiles annually, most of which are perfectly good.

How about low-hanging fruit: batteries. Forget gold and diamonds, the limited supply of lithium is far more critical for the next few years. But I can still buy Costco-sized battery packs that get thrown in the trash when they’re dead. That’s an insane waste where recycling would be cheap.

Extraction Industries

The biggest malefactor is the oil and extraction industries. I imagine if someone ever got close enough to ask an executive about responsible manufacturing, they’d be tackled by security and hauled out.

But look at the oil lifecycle. Companies have to find the dwindling oil deposits first. Lots of exploratory stuff, all of which have to be cleaned up. When they find stuff, they first extract it from the ground, releasing pollution and trashing places they’ll frequently abandon later. Corporations pipe or truck the crude stuff across every nation, cutting through our most fragile sites with only a few spills now and then. They create enormous industries to refine the stuff (more pollution and cleanup), ship it (more pollution), and sell it to us. Their part is done.

Part of this is on us. We use the stuff up pretty quickly, usually burning it, which releases several different kinds of problems. And if there’s anything left behind (used oil, ash, toxic leftovers), that’s another problem they dump on the users. The extraction industries only pay a small part of the overall costs and leave the rest of us to clean up the water, land, and air.

(And then they pay for Supreme Court justices to limit any oversight, but that’s another rant.)

Responsible Manufacturing

So here’s my answer. Yes, if we required companies to cover the total costs of their business, then some costs would rise. If the price of things included the cleanup afterward, you’d pay more.

Do you think you’re not paying the price now? Think of all the money you’re putting in corporate pockets. Think of the added misery to your life as you lose years from your expected lifetime. Yes, you pay it all. Yes, the corporations all know this. And yes, large swaths of government are run by the industries they’re supposed to restrain.