Highest and Best Use

Plastic makes things work and even eco-terrorists would be hard pressed to deny that. Unfortunately plastic comes from oil so there's a problem there. In real estate appraisal the term "highest and best use" means what a property would be worth if it were put to it's best use. An example might be if we were appraising a home in the center of an industrial area. It's value would be much more if it were turned into an industrial use.

So if you toss a 2L coke bottle, a landfill destination is not it's best use. Even if you recycle it, that's ideally not good enough either. They smush them into bales, melt them down, and reform them into what they were in the first place. That all takes a lot of energy. It's like turning the plastic bottle back into a plastic bottle with a lot of costly stops along the way.

But if you apply the highest and best use it comes out like this: the coke bottle gets refilled. End of story. Same product. Same bottle. Endless reuses. THAT is what highest and best means. The label stays. The cap gets resealed. No tossing. No landfilling.

But this solution is so labor-intensive that it is uneconomical. I have two suggestions to overcome that: a) put a $1 refundable deposit fee on each plastic container (not just the current CRV, but milk, yougurt, butter, etc.) to pay for hiring people to separate this material at the landfill or, b) take Sheriff Joe's example and have inmates do this work. Pay 30 cents an hour which applies to their room and board costs at the jail.

But how does this work in real life? Well, until we get sophisticated enough to separate our recycles at the curb we have to do it at the landfill. It's dirty, time-consuming work and not limited to plastic. Think about steel, aluminum, cardboard, glass, etc. Again, inmates make sense here.

Until somebody in Washington or Sacramento gets on board with recycling there are no options other than the old wax-coated milk containers. At least they are biodegradable.