Re: [greenyes] Plastics News - Opinion Piece on state bottle bills, etc

[Helen Spiegelman <hspie@no.address>]

Jenny has slightly misunderstood me.

In a sense the Brand-Owner is indeed the "consumer" of the supplier's 
services (in this case, the services provided by the container 
manufacturer). And in a sense, the Brand-owner is subject to the same 
advertising hype from would-be suppliers as any other consumer.

But it might be more useful to say that EPR programs that target the Brand 
Owner are similar to rules that might require householders to compost their 
yard waste rather than imposing it on the community waste management 
system. (Householders are, in a sense, "Producers" of yard waste.)

In both cases, the outcome would be that the responsible parties would look 
for alternatives. Brand-owners would seek markets for their end-of-life 
products (and redesign them to optimize their value at end of life) and 
householders would either install backyard composters, hire gardeners who 
had the capacity to compost off-site -- or turn to landscape design that 
generated less trimmings.

On Jenny's last point: the most effective bills are the ones that "target" 
the right person and thus unleash the chain of responses that allocates the 
responsibility appropriately. Normal market responses can do this much 
better than government rules that micromanage how products are to be managed.

Helen.


At 12:24 PM 04/29/2003 -0400, Jenny Gitlitz wrote:
> putting the responsibility
> solely on the brand owners, retailers and consumers.
>
> To my mind, the manufacturers are not "simply" compliant suppliers to the
> brand owners.  The idea that container (or any other) companies just deliver
> "what the consumer wants" ignores the influence of aggressive advertising
> and marketing, and you can be sure that in this competitive industry,
> marketing is at a fever pitch. Consumer demand--whether at the retail or
> wholesale level, does not merely "exist;" it is continuously created and
> manipulated.
>
> In theory, the most effective bills would target all the parties along the
> supply chain.