Treating the environment as a big trash can is evidently a bad idea. Under capitalism, however, this idea is not so self evident and requires a burden of proof. In our advanced and thoroughly propagandized consumer society, if it’s slightly more profitable to poison the ecosystems that we desperately rely on, that will be the preffered course of action, unless the citizens push back as the repeatedly had to do. The plasic bottles may be destroying the fisheries and entire ecosystems, but if they bring a 1% profit increase for coca cola, they will be used. Before this, the we had a perfectly fine mehrweg take back system where more than 90% of glass bottles were returned. This was happening during the so-called golden age of capitalism where the government and trade unions played a very important role in making sure capitalism doesn’t go completely insane and destroy us in the process.
Today, even implementing a tiny fraction of this is considered radical and green fanaticism. When in 2020 the EU pushed Austria to implement a functioning take back system for some plastic bottles, nobody could be less happy than the private waste management system. Even though the hierrarchy of waste management is clear – reduce, reuse, recycle as a last resort – the waste management companies who have nothing to win from a properly functioning reuse system did not accept it without a fight. ARA in particular, went on behalf of its biggest patrons from the supermarket chains on a PR offensive explaining how the move to introduce very modest plastic packaging return systems would cause losses to it for around 45 million in licensing fees. ARA is supposed to be an NGO enforcing rules of producer responsibility on big packaging producers such as SPAR and REWE. But since Spar and Rewe more or less control ARA by having its people on the supervisory board, ARA is more of an instrument that is used to keep their profits and control of the market intact. Since the need to introduce big machines for returning the bottles and paying the licensing fee to someone else implies losses to them, the Supermarkets and their “producer responsibility” NGO tried to stall the move to implement this system as long as humanly possible, with Austria being one of the last countries to implement such as system in Europe after Latvia, Croatia, Romania and Slovakia.
In the interview to the Austrian business magazine trend.at, says Saubermacher gründer Hans Roth:
„Ich war nicht überzeugt von der gewählten Umsetzung. Aus unserer Sicht wäre eine kostengünstigere und digitale Lösung naheliegender gewesen – eine, die bestehende Strukturen nutzt, statt mit Investitionen von über 100 Millionen Euro neue aufzubauen.“
Translation – “there are powerful people who use waste streams as business. The interests of these people have to be considered first and foremost before implementing something that actually helps the environment – even if it’s just a little”. The Germany waste industry had a similar reaction in 2003 when the green party forced a deposit system on all plastic bottles. The supermaket Norma claimed it will nearly go bankrupt because of the enourmoues costs that the deposit machines will have. Unsurprisingly the claims were proven by the courts to be very exagerated and Norma could afford a couple of 10 000 euro machines without going bankrupt.
This should reveal something rather obvious to all of us – the waste industry is not only not sustainable but actively impeding a chance at a more sustainable future.
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