Are we ready to face the true cost of stuff?

I’m going to begin with a little trip down memory lane so, for those of you born post 1990 you can fast forward.

When I was a child we had recyclable milk bottles delivered by a man in an electric milk float. We also had a ‘pop man’ who used to sell us dandelion and burdock and American cream soda in large glass bottles that we paid a deposit on. Where I lived there was a small ‘Hoover’ repair shop that fixed vacuum cleaners and a chap down on the high street that repaired TV’s the size of a compact car. We don’t have any of this now. Even cobblers are diminishing in number and the reason for all of this is simple. We don’t recognise the true cost of anything any more.

We stopped buying milk from the milk man because it was as easy to pick it up at the supermarket and it was cheaper. It was cheaper because it came in a blown plastic bottle that cost the producer pennies. Nobody had to worry about the cost of collecting glass bottles, washing them and sanitising them, loading them into the bottling plant. The problem is that the true cost of the plastic bottle isn’t pennies. Who’s paying for the cost of the waste management and landfill? Who’s paying for the recycling (if indeed it ever gets recycled)? In reality, if we’d thought about it we’d have taxed the plastic bottle manufacturers and the money raised spent on building waste recycling centres but we didn’t. The bottle manufacturers got rich because the costs associated with their business are just passed on to the taxpayer. Even worse, when we were kids, because there was a deposit on all pop bottles, we used to make sure that we collected them and took them back – this was a source of pocket money for us as children. Nowadays, because there is no value ascribed to these plastic bottles or aluminium cans we find them littering the streets.

On Christmas Eve here at home, right on cue,  the tumble dryer broke down. (Doesn’t it always happen at the most convenient times). My first reaction was to wonder who we could get out to repair it at this time of year. My wife pointed out that a new one was ￡190 and given that ours was pushing 10 years old…… My heart sank. I remembered buying angle grinders in France a few years ago for €18. It was almost cheaper to buy a new one than to replace the blunt discs. My in-laws have just purchased a Bosch pod coffee machine (don’t get me started on the wastefulness of coffee pod machines) for ￡20! ￡20! It’s made of dozens of bits of plastic and metal and when it finally pushes out its last espresso it’ll probably end up in landfill. The actual cost to the planet is immense but we can get one for ￡20.

The answer is fairly simple but I suspect, totally unpalatable. Ascribe the true cost of stuff to whatever it is, and tax up to that value at source. If Tassimo/Nespresso or whoever, want to profit by hooking people into buying their pods by selling coffee machines at below cost, then they should be taxed. The money raised could then be ploughed into building waste recycling plants to deal with the consequences even if those won’t be realised for another 5 or 6 years. At the least we could plant trees with the cash. But will Joe public accept this? If you had to pay an extra 40p for your polystyrene packaged kebab on the way home because someone was going to have to deal with disposing of the packaging sometime would you vote for the government that just cost you another 40p?

An interesting conundrum.

On the matter of the tumble dryer, I will be getting it repaired even if the repair costs ￡190 because I can’t bear to think of what will happen to the old one.