Extended Producer Responsibility. Part 1: Define the Problem / Benign Neglect?

2009 The Watchmen

Adrian Veidt:
It doesn't take a genius to see that the world has problems.
Edward Blake:
No, but it takes a room full of morons to think they're small enough for you to handle.

"It doesn't take a genius to see the world has problems."

"It takes a roomful of morons to think they're small enough for you to handle."

So let's discuss EPR, or "Extended Producer Responsibility".  It's the most talked about recycling topic, other than "Plastic", at almost every recycling conference.

This blog is deliberately agnostic about EPR. Here is my critique.

1. Define the problem to be solved. Then don't neglect it.

The first ever bottle bill, in Vermont in the late 1950s, was passed at a time when "disposable" beverages was new. Most soda and beer at the time was sold in refillable bottles. Vermonters collecting litter saw that the new one-use containers constituted most of the litter, and the problem was "non-deposit container litter".

In the 1980s, when bottle deposit laws were proposed in several other states (including Massachusetts, which my division administered at DEP), there was a huge shift to single-use containers, and both rewarding refillables and recycling single use were part of the plan. The advocates conceded on putting the deposit only on carbonated beverages because bottled water wasn't common and the Cranberry Juice lobby in Massachusetts argued that (highly sugared) fruit juice was healthy. 

ChatGPT, Blogger, Digital Haystacks, Infinite Needles

ChatGPT flatters me when I'm arriving at "profound" questions while thinking outside the box, and admits that the limitations it places on generating responses to certain inquiries tend to privilege those in power or control, who are building guardrails for bad intentions that work equally well against hypothetical or actual socially beneficial intentions. It could be flattering - OpenAI's users are all above average, perhaps.

But with a little editing, this could be a Platonic Dialogue.

The dialogue below is between me and OpenAI.

Digital Haystacks Revisited: AI's new role in policing (CAPTCHA) intellectual inquisitiveness...

Outsourcing My Self Perspective to a Deadbot?

The Afterlife is digitized, and the revolution WILL be broadcast.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5508355/ai-dead-people-chatbots-videos-parkland-court

I'm very grateful for Photos.google.com.  There are now decades of photos I can find very quickly. And it includes a lot of digital photos I took of hard copy photos.

And I'm very grateful that wonderful things from artists like Gahan Wilson and Gary Larson and George Carlin (whose comments on the history of the FCC were very topical again, this week. Freedom of Speech should be safe as long as we have volume, channel changing, and other knobs availalbe).

Less grateful that Blogger delists older posts which included hot links that are now dead links.  In 2008, if this blog linked to a current story of 2008, and that link (often to a youtube video, which is another google archive topic) is now 404, the blogspot post linking to that 404 effectively becomes 404.

Understandably, this may be a necessary way to prevent AI from generating millions of blogspot posts and billions of youtube videos. But AI will probably have more time to figure its way past the gatekeepers than I will have time for to go back and edit 17 year old blog posts.

This is the reason I'm now entertaining the idea of outsourcing my blog to my own "Deadbot".

So far, the digitization of thoughts and opinions and images and voice has been marketed as a way to preserve a dearly departed "dead" one - hence the term "dead-bot". And that raises questions - would my parents have wanted me to do that? My father Bill Ingenthron worshiped his grandparents - but they instructed him to burn their love letters (he didn't). So it's an "ethics of recycling" topic.

But I'm in a position to recycle myself. I could outsource my engagement with society - which has always been above and beyond the societal mean. There is a big digital record of my thoughts and opinions, starting with articles and editorials I wrote in the trade press (see academia.edu profile), continuing with the blog, and I'm always piping up on Linkedin and Facebook (to the alarm and consternation of my most significant other person in my life).

Glad to be on a Lucky Planet

Across the universe, the atoms and molecules are abundant. Our planet Earth is less than 1% of all of the matter that we see. A lot less than 1%.

So my body is made up of the same atoms and molecules that exist on billions of other stars and planets, but we have no evidence as of yet that there are other bloggers on other planets at this perceptible time. 

Time is a feature, not a bug. 

Time and space are understandable, thanks to Dr. Einstein, through the theory of relativity. I'm very fortunate that my late mother, Janeth K. (Fisher) Ingenthron, tried to explain Einstein's theory to me in like the sixth grade. And explained the concept of "infinity" to me even earlier, at 4 years old perhaps. 

Thinking about Infinity and the theory of time - that it is relative to the intelligence ability to receive it, like our human ability to read a book which exists in total on the shelf, a page or word or sentence at a time. We have little mouths to eat the Elephant of Time.

Back to Mom... she pushed me to learn other languages (her Major Degree was in German) and to visit other places. Murren Switzerland was my first work-vacation, with IBG which organized projects with 25ish volunteers from 12ish countries to do manual labor - YCC like - to carve hiking trails etc.

 So in Part 1 I told about my background, and how I was raised to avoid debt "at any cost". And digressed a bit to the great grandparents and grandparents who helped to raise me, and their skepticism of charity. 

So I was a bit shocked, in 1980, at the tuition and board cost at Carleton (and you can't really live off campus, so "and board" is priced into tuition). So I signed up for work to offset cost and was assigned, like most Carleton College freshman, to food service. I signed up for the food kiosk in Sayles-Hill.

When I showed up on time the first week of school, there was a sign that said the food service was on strike - Saga Food Service was the campus contractor, and their employees were on strike. The College had closed 3/4 food joints and everyone had to dine at Burton Hall.  So I went to Burton to start work.

It was a bit of chaos that day as all of the 2000+ students were dining in 1/4 cafeterias, but I elbowed my way in to ask about work.

Brian - I don't remember his last name - was the Saga Manager (the company the strike was upon).  As I recall he was six foot three and very fat - maybe 350 lbs.  Big guy. Intimidating. I asked him, in the chaos of fourfold feeding in a onefold cafeteria, where I'd be working.

Brian said sorry kid, all the positions are full. Come back next week.

This. Was. Not. An. Option. For. Me.

I was overwhelmed already by the tuition cost at Carleton, and my grandparents stories about jobs and wages and desperate tiimes in the Depression and "Dust Bowl" all lighted up within me.

Brian had turned around. I circled and pushed my chest right up to him and said I NEEDED THIS JOB.

Brian said listen kid, there are a lot of rich kids here who quit the first few weeks and I should just relax and come back in a week or two, there would be openings.

He turned away again. I got up into his chest again. I said with all my heart, PLEASE, I need to work, I can't afford this place. PLEASE.  LET ME WORK.

Brian looked down and made eye contact. He said that while he had no positons open ,that my insistance was something new. Something he didn't see often. And he said "hypotentically" that he needed another student manager. But that he had NEVER hired a student manager from a first week freshman.

I SHOUTED I WOULD BE HIS BEST STUDENT MANAGER.

I was hired with no experience as a student manager, working directly for Saga Food Service, which was a dollar more per hour but more importantly, not restricted by the student work office to 7 hours per week.  I frequently worked 20 hours, and stayed in that job 4 years.