The Double C, Double P Game

Its like basketball or poker: anyone can play, but few are really good. It’s the Double C, Double P game, or CCPP for short. You may have already participated. Imagine cruising down the freeway with the sound cranked up, munching a burger. Then thoughtlessly you roll down the window and toss the wrapper. Congratulations! You’re a player. You have eliminated your waste problem and handed it over to the rest of us. That’s pretty much the whole game. Its a fancy name for littering.

But that’s just the first level. Next is “illegal dumping”. A household or small business might want to bypass the expense and inconvenience of waste disposal. If you have more trash than your weekly pickup guys can handle, there are legitimate ways of getting rid of it. You might take it to the dump and pay a fee. You might pay someone to haul it away.

But if the expense is too much, or that dreary ride through traffic to the bad side of town just isn’t for you, then what? Why not just leave it on the side of the road in the middle of the night?

That’s what happened when you see an oddly placed trash bag or piece of furniture while driving down the road. If you live in a nice neighborhood and have never seen this, do a web search on “illegal dumping”, and select “images”.

But an old refrigerator or couch is still amateur hour. To play the CCPP game like a pro, truly large quantities of waste are required — quantities beyond what most individuals are capable of generating, but easy for a large corporation. For example, a tire company.

Occasionally you read a news story about a tire pile — old discarded “waste tires” — that has become a tourist attraction. It may contain millions of tires. It may be burning. You think to yourself, “How cool is that? Maybe I’ll check it out on a road trip someday.”

We owe the CCPP terminology to the late professor Garrett James Hardin of the University of California, Santa Barbara. It means “Commonize the Cost and Privatize the Profit”. He elaborates in his 1985 Book “Filters Against Folly”. He also wrote the famous article in the December 13, 1968 issue of Science Magazine “The Tragedy of the Commons”, where we learn how easy it is to turn a natural wonder into desolation.

Since we don’t often hear of tire piles, you might assume that such a newsworthy one is unique, or at least uncommon.

Unfortunately, you would be mistaken. There are so many old tires accumulating across the country that states need documented tire pile policies. There are thousands of these piles, some containing millions of tires. They are hazardous. A tire’s shape is perfect for holding water, thereby becoming a miniature mosquito breeding pond.

And when a large pile catches fire, it can burn for weeks or months (yes!) polluting the air and ground. They can ignite nearby structures, even start forest fires. The smoke is really gross. States have laws regulating the storage and cleanup of these piles. Our representatives are working hard to protect you from tire danger. Dealing with waste tires is expensive and we pay for it.

“Commonize the cost”, or as we sometimes hear “Socialize the cost” means the community pays cleanup costs. Yep, you heard that right. When it comes to cleaning up old tires, we have socialism. Sorry.

The community can be a city, a state, a country, or the whole world. This includes you. Just think of money migrating from your pocket into a tire-cleanup fund.

“Privatize the profits” means that all the profits go to the company, and none go to the community that paid for cleanup. As a tire maker, I would like to sell the tire, take my profit, and never have to deal with that friggin’ tire again. Better to let society at large deal with it.

Tires are just one example of mega-waste. There are chemical plant discharges into rivers, smokestack pollution, old computer equipment, plastic bags everywhere, coal ash ponds, lakes of pig shit (yeah, that’s a thing). Plenty more. You know. Just look around.

One would think that in pure capitalism, the price paid for a product would include not only the cost of production but also the cost of disposal when the time comes. “Life cycle cost” is the term. Included in the price would be fair profit for the producer.

Corps, however, would rather “externalize” the cost and avoid the expense and hassle of cleanup. This term refers to a cost that is born by neither the buyer nor the seller, but by some individual or group not involved in the transaction.

CCPP / externalization is a profitable game for a big corp. Or, in the words of Shareholder activist Robert Monks, “The corporation is an externalizing machine in the same way a shark is a killing machine.”

But there is a growing worldwide product take-back movement. This means that responsibility for an item won’t end when it is handed over from the seller to the buyer. The producer has to take the item back when its useful life is over. Here we have de-externalization.

In the long run, everyone benefits, corporations included, resulting in a cleaner healthier and more sustainable planet. But alas, corps are short term thinkers.

In the post corporate personhood era, it will be easier to engineer a permanent solution to the waste tire problem. There will be economic incentives up and down the supply chain for old tires to make their way back to the manufacturers at the end of their useful lives. When you trade in your old tires, you will get a credit, as tire companies will be required to pay you for them. For those of you who remember deposit bottles, its the same concept.

Manufacturers are best positioned to deal with their own used products, since they know exactly what is in them and how they are put together. They also have the option of modifying their construction to facilitate recycling.

Thus manufacturer participation in recycling will be mandatory. It must be done be done according to best practices, and regulatory oversight will guarantee it. No cutting corners. Penalties will apply.

But we must also deal with existing tire piles. We have apparently made some progress in this front and there are actually fewer tires in waste piles now than in decades past.

But we aren’t finished. In the post corporate-personhood future, companies will also be required to use some of their profits to clean up existing collections of waste tires. Individual tire-makers have come and gone, but the industry remains robust. It must clean up the mess.

Once corporate personhood has been eliminated, passage of the relevant laws and regulations will be possible, and we can look forward to a tire-pile free world.