07 — Environment
Paradise for a Parking Lot
One plastic bottle can buy a stalk of bananas. Megatons of them can buy a dead ocean. The only thing that changed is how many.
One of my favorite sailing stories is about the Crafton family — pioneers who sailed the world to live the life, back before anyone did it for a camera or a paycheck. In one interview, a crew member described trading with villages in Papua New Guinea, places with no stores and no electricity.
An empty plastic bottle with a screw-on cap — the kind I toss without a thought — was a treasure there. It held fresh water. One bottle we were about to throw away could be traded for a whole stalk of bananas, or a basket of mangoes.
It’s a lovely story. It should also worry you. Because one bottle is a gift, and megatons of them a year is a catastrophe — and the only thing that changed is how many. Treasure and poison are the same object at different scales.
We don’t have an addiction to plastic so much as we’ve lost the ability to stop at enough. Dan Gilbert’s work on synthetic happiness explains half of it: the convenience delights us for about a week, and then we adapt. The pleasure fades — but the bottle doesn’t. We keep buying the fading hit, and the permanent thing piles up behind us. The Amish, whatever else you make of them, at least noticed this and chose their constraints on purpose — deciding in advance which conveniences to refuse, before the refusal got made for them by a poisoned well.
And plastic is only where you can see it most clearly. The same trade — buy the convenience now, hand the bill to the next generation — is the one we make with the coastline, the aquifer, the climate, the quiet. Paradise for a parking lot, every time, because the parking lot is useful today and paradise doesn’t send an invoice until later.
01One Rule: If You Make It, You Own Its End
So here’s the rule I’d write, and it fits on an index card:
If you create it or mass-sell it, you have to have an end-of-life plan for it.
Not a slogan on the label — a real, funded plan for where the thing goes when we’re done with it. And this isn’t hypothetical, which is the part worth knowing. It already has a name, Extended Producer Responsibility, and it’s already law. Seven states — Maine, Oregon, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington — have put it on the books, and the mechanism is exactly the one above: the producer, not the taxpayer, funds the end-of-life management of what it sells. The principle isn’t a fantasy. It’s in seven statute books and spreading.
But look closely at what those laws cover, and you find the catch. Every one of them stops at packaging. The bottle, the box, the mailer — the wrapper around the product, never the product, and never the products whose harm won’t fit in a recycling bin. That scoping wasn’t an accident. It’s the compromise industry could live with: make us responsible for the cardboard, just don’t make us responsible for the thing inside it. My rule refuses that compromise. “If you make it or mass-sell it” doesn’t say packaging. It says the thing itself — which is exactly what drags the harder cases into a frame the existing laws were built to keep them out of.
02Three Places the Rule Goes Next
The case you can already seePlastic
Packaging EPR is the proof of concept, and it should simply grow up. Right now a company owes for the shrink-wrap and walks away from the product. Extend the same accounting to the product’s whole life and the incentive flips: the cheapest thing to make becomes the thing that’s cheapest to take back, not the thing that’s cheapest to abandon. You don’t have to ban a single item. You just stop letting the maker leave before the cleanup — and watch how fast “unrecyclable” designs disappear once someone has to pay to bury them.
The barrel’s end-of-life plan is the skyOil
Ask what the end-of-life plan is for a barrel of oil and the honest answer is: the atmosphere. That’s where it goes when we’re done — and right now that disposal is free. The whole climate fight, in this framing, is an argument about one missing invoice. Nobody is billed for using the sky as a landfill, so the sky gets used as a landfill.
Price the disposal — make the maker carry the real cost of where the carbon ends up — and you haven’t outlawed energy. You’ve just stopped subsidizing the one form of it that gets to dump its waste for free while everything cleaner pays its own way.
A product that can’t have an end of lifeForever Chemicals
PFAS are called forever chemicals for a reason, and the name is the entire argument. A forever chemical is, by definition, a product with no possible end of life — it does not break down, not in your lifetime or your great-grandchildren’s.
Run it through the rule: you may mass-sell this once you have a plan to retire it. You can’t have one. There isn’t one. So the rule doesn’t need to ban anything — it just stops letting a company sell permanence and hand that permanence to everyone downstream, in their water and eventually in their blood, for free. If you truly cannot dispose of a thing, you haven’t earned the right to flood the world with it.
Notice what this rule does and doesn’t do. It doesn’t chase each poison with its own thick binder of symptom-specific regulation — a rule for bottles, a rule for barrels, a rule for PFAS, each one fought line by line by the people who profit from the status quo. It installs one structural fact — you own your product’s whole life, cradle to grave — and lets that fact reshape what’s worth making in the first place.
Change what it costs to abandon a thing, and you change what gets built. Change the environment, and you change the world.