Recently a new regulation was introduced in the Netherlands. All product packaging with a plastic cap now has to make sure that cap stays attached. In practice, this means the cap acts as a hinge, after twisting it for the first time. It takes quite some force if you want to rip it off completely.
Why?
Why? To reduce (plastic) pollution!
I don’t know the statistics, and I can’t say I ever noticed this myself, but plastic caps are probably a major type of garbage found in nature. They probably noticed that a lot of people are fine with putting the packaging in the right place, but completely forget about the plastic cap, or just lose it.
Forcing manufacturers to attach it to the product seems like a good way to solve a problem, right? It’s a very cheap and straightforward solution that solves two things at once. Less plastic pollution, and people don’t lose that darn cap all the time. Right?
Well, you can probably guess I didn’t write this article just to say that I agree and that’s that.
I find it fascinating that this regulation went through, when so many others did not. I find it fascinating that this is the thing where the majority said “yeah sure, let’s force everyone to do that”.
Because it’s really not solving anything. It’s a solution that was most likely the result of something I call thinking small.
When you only consider very direct reasoning and consequences, then yes, this seems like a good regulation.
But if you think slightly bigger—if you actually take into account all possible factors and think more long-term—this falls apart. It’s a law that rewards people for being lazy, just to get rid of a short-term problem.
What’s the real issue?
I have never littered a plastic cap in my life. At least, as far as I can remember. I can’t make guarantees about when I was a toddler, but I assume I wasn’t allowed to handle swallowable plastic caps at that age anyway.
It’s really very easy. You take off the cap, use the thing, put it back on. This does not take a huge amount of energy, physically or mentally.
I mean, if you really want to optimize something like pouring a glass of milk, there are infinitely better ways. Create lower glasses (or taller packaging), so you don’t need to raise and tilt the package as much. Put the cap at the bottom so you don’t even need to tilt anything. Or forget the plastic caps completely: just make it normal to keep a large cauldron of milk in your kitchen so you can just dip your glass into it :p
No, having to unscrew a plastic cap and then screw it back on is just not a big deal. It’s not a thing that needs to be easier or faster. I am scared for anyone who claims that it’s too much work and they are right to litter plastic caps everywhere. (What else is too much work? Breathing? Opening your eyes?)
So who are all those people dropping those caps? Who are all the people polluting?
They’re the ones who absolutely do not care. They’re the ones who’d also throw candy wrappers in a bush. The ones who burn their organic waste in the backyard because it’s easier than bringing it to the proper place. The ones who spit chewing gum at an animal and laugh.
Okay, perhaps a bit dramatic, but you get my point. There is a group of people that actually causes the majority of (plastic) pollution, and this regulation does not solve any of that. In fact, it just guarantees that instead of dropping a single cap somewhere, they’ll now just drop the entire package. Because they’re connected to each other!
These people laugh at the change. Or, based on my experience with young boys and their stupid ways, they might actually challenge each other to rip off the caps anyway or try to blow them off the packaging.
The actual consequences
So what does this regulation actually do?
- More work and costs for manufacturers.
- A lot of time and energy spent by lawmakers to push this through.
- More work needed by everyone who uses such a package.
This regulation has been in effect for months now, and I still get people cursing it. Because the cap just won’t go far enough and now they’re pouring milk into the cap instead of into their glass. Because they opened it with too much force, and now the cap came off and another part of the packaging. Because they forgot about the change and acidentally caused a mess.
I have never littered a plastic cap in my life, or anything at all really. But now I have to spend a little bit more energy every time I want to use 90% of products from the supermarket. Now I know where all my tax dollars went, as opposed to using it on actual meaningful stuff. Now I am regularly tempted to change my good habits around handling waste because that attached cap is so annoying or disrupts me.
This regulation is a perfect example of something that sounds reasonable, and probably therefore actually came into effect quickly, but in reality makes the problem worse long-term.
They thought small. They thought one step ahead, a chain of only one consequence, and called it a day. They thought: “Oh we see a lot of plastic caps in the environment => so let’s attach them so people don’t lose them!” And they didn’t think any further.
If they had thought big for just a second, they’d realize this wasn’t a great idea. Their time and money would be better spent elsewhere, because they actively made something worse.
My biggest gripe
Worst of all, as I hinted at the start, this rewards people for bad behavior. This is a simple truth that I learned over, and over, and over, as I made games my entire life and studied human psychology because of it.
The last thing you want to do, when people behave badly, is solve the consequences of it. Because this rewards the behavior and basically confirms it’s okay. Sure, keep doing that, we’ll just go out of our way to treat the symptoms, hmm?
If people are too lazy to screw a plastic cap back onto a packaging, you do not want to confirm that behavior. You don’t want to confirm, with a regulation like this, that “yes it’s soo hard not to litter plastic caps, so we’ll force an entire new type of packaging just to solve it for you”. Now those people will keep being lazy, and they’ll keep polluting, and the group has just received a few new members thanks to the regulation.
It should be exactly the other way around. If problems arise because people behave badly, then you should make sure the problems/consequences go to them. Put your energy and laws into achieving that. In fact, make the consequences worse for the people causing it!
This not only prevents rewarding the wrong behavior, it’s also more fair. Because the consequences of your actions end up on your plate, you can’t reasonably say that the government interfered or outside forces are ruining your life. It’s all in your hands. You have the freedom to stop the bad consequences.
Example: Parenting
To confirm my point, a second example from parenting. Countless times, I’ve heard parents say “well X never cleans up their room anyway, so we’re not even asking anymore” or “well Y always responds with anger when we ask them to do their chores, so we’re not asking anymore”. This is extremely common.
And on an emotional level, you can understand. It’s a bigger effort to tell your kid to behave when they respond with anger each time. There’s an element of parental love that just wants to see your kid happy, and free, and to give them anything they desire.
But thinking bigger (logically and long-term), this is exactly the thing you don’t want to do!
You are rewarding your child for responding with anger to everything (for example). And the bad consequences of their actions—a messy room, other children who need to do double chores, etcetera—are taken away from them. They end up on the parent’s plate, or, as stated, the plate of their other children. (Yes, speaking from experience.)
This is a cycle that will reinforce that bad behavior forever and will keep a problem forever. Thus it will suck energy forever and only get worse.
Instead, when a child refuses to do their chores, all consequences should be on them. For example, divide the chores so that the one thing the child likes most—such as washed, nice-smelling clothes—is (partially) their duty. If they don’t do it, they are the ones to suffer most. If they don’t clean their room, don’t clean it for them.
You’re not wasting any energy on this. You don’t have to be angry at them or treat them badly. This isn’t even a punishment. It’s just a smart “policy change” to not reward the behavior that you don’t want.
Similarly, If a child is manipulative and using stubbornness to get their way, you never ever give them what they want. Even if their request was reasonable at first! If a child asks for permission to do something small, but they are being manipulative as they do it, just categorically deny it. And tell them why, of course.
Otherwise, you get parents who are like “Fine! Just shut up! Use our car to go to the party tonight!” And you know what you’ve just done? You’ve rewarded their bad behavior, and they’ll do it even more next time.
Conclusion
Anyway, I use the plastic cap paradox as a simple example of how this goes wrong every time.
People do tiny things that they think are reasonable; lawmakers certainly love to create such regulations here in the Netherlands.
In reality, they are actively rewarding bad behavior, and often slightly punishing those who had nothing to do with it. And they could’ve seen that if they thought long-term. If they thought about more factors than just the one statistic or problem in front of them. If they actually studied human psychology and how to formulate effective laws, which often has nothing to do with statistics or design by committee.
I think this is a major lesson anyone can use in their life, especially parents dealing with “parenting”.
Whenever you decide policy, check if you’re not (accidentally) rewarding bad behavior. By taking away the consequences, for example, or treating symptoms of a disease caused by others. Almost any system can be optimized by doing so, supplemented by rewarding the good thing. Punishment should be almost non-existent, and you should think in big policies instead of tiny changes.
But lawmakers (and parents) never seem to understand. Somehow. I’d consider this the very first lesson in Designing Function Systems that Involve Humans 101. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong.
Instead of attaching that plastic cap to the packaging, they could’ve come up with endless other solutions. If those follow that mantra I wrote above, any of them would’ve actually worked far better. Both short-term and long-term.
For example,
- REWARD GOOD: Reward/subsidize companies to create non-plastic packaging.
- I mean, you could easily do that from the money that is now spent on updating all packaging to slightly more complicated plastic stuff.
- DON’T REWARD BAD: If your product has a plastic cap, you’re automatically ineligible for any other subsidies or niceties around your product. (Like, I don’t know, your product can’t ever have a discount or be in an advertisment.)
- This is not a punishment. It’s just not offering nice things—aka rewards—to a bad thing.
You could bend over backwards to call this a punishment on the assumption that “everyone has an equal right to have their products discounted” or “this restricts freedom in pricing/commerce”, but I’d find that hard to argue. Forcing everyone to create attached plastic caps is a far larger restriction of freedom (and government overreach) than this. Our commercial space is heavily restricted and controlled. And I’m not sure that God wrote down “And thou shall be allowed to market products that ruin the environment!” in his Ten Commandments.
Another example,
- We have a “deposit” on glass. You pay a bit more for every glass bottle you buy, but you can get back that money by nicely bringing the glass back to the supermarket.
- Why not do the same thing for plastic? Just make all plastic products a bit more expensive. But you can get that money back by nicely bringing the plastic (including cap!) back to the supermarket.
- (If you combine this with the other example above, you should now have plenty non-plastic packaging that is cheaper than the plastic too. The most obvious move for everyone is not to buy plastic packaging at all! Which obviously makes it impossible to litter plastic caps.)
I’m coming up with these things in 10 seconds. Of course there is more nuance here and more would need to be researched for such solutions. I’m just giving some examples.
Instead, a few lawmakers will be proud of themselves and feel like they achieved something, while the rest of the world is now annoyed, and the polluters keep polluting with joy.
Oh well. I’m used to the new caps by now, and who knows, maybe next year there will be clear statistics about a major decrease in plastic in the environment.
If only politicians were game developers; they’d actually know how to nudge people towards the behavior they want.
Those were my thoughts for today,
Tiamo