The Thing Is...

[forsyth]

See, pollution is waste, right? Waste costs money, it's stuff you bought that doesn't go into the finished product. So by producing less waste, production becomes more efficient, which, which in turn makes costs go down which means more profit.

So why don't industry execs think this way? Besides the ridiculous short-term incentives built into the stock market to ignore the long term.

Comments

[dirkdada.livejournal.com]

Waste, by it's very definition, is useless. Waste costs money because you have to store it, dispose of it, or invest in more expensive technologies to reduce it.

Burning it and spewing it into the air is the cheapest from an individual company's point of view because it spreads the cost out to the general population. We pay for it with acid rain and undrinkable water, by breathing it in and contracting cancer and black lung.

In other words, the companies are storing their pollution in our bodies and our environment free of charge.

You can't beat that price point.