The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [173]
2. Implement significant taxes to discourage wasteful packaging and products, such as single-use beverage containers and disposable plastic bags. Ban outright those materials that are inherently toxic, such as consumer products containing mercury or PVC. Germany’s Green Dot program, national bottle bills, and disposable bag taxes and bans in numerous countries demonstrate the waste reduction potential of these tools.
3. Develop a national composting infrastructure to ensure that organic waste is kept out of landfills and that composting biomaterials moves from ideal to reality. This should include support for decentralized (backyard or community level) composting where possible, supplemented by municipal composting operations.
4. Prohibit all waste incineration. It’s simply not needed; technically viable and less polluting nonincineration alternatives exist for medical, municipal, and hazardous wastes. Instead, adopt a zero waste goal and invest in waste prevention, reuse, and recycling programs that conserve resources, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and create jobs. Prohibit all scams aiming to give renewable energy credits or carbon offset credits to waste incinerators and landfill gas burning! To get involved, contact the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives at www.no-burn.org.
5. For municipal wastes, implement pay-as-you-throw systems at the local level in which households and businesses pay more for waste disposal the more they throw away. For hazardous wastes, focus on prevention, as the wonderful Toxics Use Reduction Institute (www.turi.org) has demonstrated is possible.
Other Good Ideas
Taxes and Banking
1. Tax resource use rather than labor; this motivates employers to conserve resources and hire more people.
2. Eliminate government subsidies for environmentally destructive activities and products, from mining to SUVs.
3. Cancel debts for poor countries, many of which were obtained under corrupt conditions to build projects benefiting the donor country.
Corporate Accountability
1. End the guarantees of limited liability for corporate wrongdoing and constitutional protections of corporations as individuals that are currently conferred upon them, via their corporate charters, under U.S. corporate law.
2. Institute limits on executive salaries and raise minimum wages to reduce the obscene gap between rich and poor in the United States. A good start would be immediately restricting the compensation of top earners to one to two hundred times as much as the company’s lowest-paid employee (still far higher than in other countries), with progressive restrictions each year to further shrink the income gap to a much healthier and fair ratio.
3. Strengthen corporate accountability domestically and internationally by improving rules on transparency and public involvement in decision making. In the United States, protect the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) which allows foreign nationals to bring legal cases against U.S. companies for human rights or environmental abuses they cause beyond U.S. borders. Business organizations that advocate for corporate rights and free trade, including the National Foreign Trade Council and USA* Engage, are lobbying the U.S. government to weaken or repeal ATCA. To support this important law, contact the Center for Constitutional Rights (www.ccrjustice.org), EarthRights International (www.earthrights.org), and Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org).
International Cooperation and Solidarity
1. Be a part of the solution, not the problem. Insist that the U.S. Government cooperate in international environmental fora and agreements. Across the board, from the Basel Convention, which deals with international waste trafficking, to the critically important UN climate convention,