Uncle Charley and the Styrofoam Reef

Uncle Charley handed me a beer as I sat down beside him on the front porch glider. I thanked him and settled down comfortably.

"Charley," I said, "I got a problem with my lawn".

"I don't want to hear yer lawn problem right now. We got a lot worse one I been thinking about. I'm older'n you and prolly gonna die first so I get priority".

"OK, what's your problem?" I asked, possibly a little peevishly.

"I been thinking about packaging. All that stuff we end up with after we're finished with whatever was inside... makes a lot of trash."

"Sure it does," I said. "So what?"

"So what? I'll tell you so what! You know who pays for getting rid of that stuff? We do! You know who ought to pay for getting rid of it? The company that put that stuff on." He paused and took a sip from his beer.

"It's worse than that," he said thoughtfully. "Some of that packaging never really goes away. I'm not talking about paper sacks or carboard boxes. We can burn 'em or we can put 'em in a land fill, and in a few hunderd years they'll just be part of the soil. But that styrofoam, that's a whole different story. That stuff never goes away. In ten thousand years we'll have beaches made of it."

"What do you think we should do?"

"How about this? What if manufacturers had to pay for the cost of making their packaging biodegradable?"

"You mean burn it?"

"Nah, ya poop-fer-brains. That only solves one problem while making a worse one. We got to find a way to make it a bad deal for manufacturers, and one they can't just ignore or take our a stupid ad like usual. I mean hit 'em in the pocket book. Make them pay for what it costs."

"They'll just pass the cost on to us", I said dubiously.

"Sure, Harry. But here's the real kicker. If I got to choose whether to buy a hamburger in a styrofoam box for ten bucks or the same hamburger in a paper box for 5 bucks, what do you think I'll pick?"

"Huh." I said, thinking about it. "You'd force the manufacturers to price their product including the cost of actually getting rid of the packaging. Not just the cost of the packaging, which is pretty cheap, getting rid of it appropriately. That's smart. It just might work".

"Even if it only kinda works, it's better than having the Great North American Reef in the Gulf of Mexico made 2 miles high of styrofoam."

"You got a point," I said.