[mngnt]

This is actually the popular opinion, world wide. It's what we've been doing for decades. And it's terrible.

The really unpopular opinion is "let's generate less trash and reuse everything we can, plus slap a recycling tax on everything".

[wkat4242]

It is but on the scale of this island it's a drop in the ocean ;)

All the car wrecks combined would be like one sunk ship.

[eimrine]

What is the difference between recycling taxes and regular ones?

[mngnt]

I would envision it as a money that don't go to the general pile of tax-raised money which becomes the country's government budget, but be kept separate and be used for investments in recycling and environemtn protection. I am not a lawyer and have no idea if this is a thing anywhere, but it seems so logical. You raise money off an ecological problem and use them, directly, to solve the ecological problem (and others).

[ustolemyname]

This is challenging to answer with the nonspecific, "regular ones?"

What, to you, is a "regular tax?"

Payroll taxes? Income taxes? Property taxes? Sales taxes? Carbon taxes? Gas taxes? Cigarette taxes?

All are as dissimilar to recycling taxes as they are to each other.

[midoridensha]

Why is it terrible? The OP said to burn what you can for electricity, so that really should just leave metals. Copper is valuable, so hopefully they'd strip all the wiring and recycle it, leaving just steel and maybe aluminum (which itself is valuable for recycling too). How is dumping steel car frames in the ocean "terrible"? These days, entire ships are sunk (after getting all the fluids out of them) to actually help the ocean wildlife as artificial reefs.

However, I do agree there should be a lot more effort to recycle this stuff.

[mngnt]

Burning plastic/paper/other packaging gets you a lot of toxic stuff in the atmosphere. I know there are filters and processes and whatnot, but it just feels wrong and smelly.

Aluminium recycling actually works great, recycled aluminium is 95% less energy expensive and some 75% of aluminium comes from recycling. (1)

Steel could also be recycled like that, I guess ships are a lot more difficult to cut apart and melt down than cars, because they are heavier and larger (citation needed). At any rate, we put a lot of resources and energy into the steel for cars, maybe we should use that steel as much as possible instead of putting more energy into more steel.

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling

[tonyedgecombe]

>after getting all the fluids out of them

Stripping the toxic elements out of a car isn't trivial, especially so in a place as poor as Tonga.