I guess investing into cleaner manufacturing technology would be a start. There'd be a much bigger incentive to do that in another country, or in a China that actually enforced its own laws.
Well you could ban at the manufacturing level, and ideally use political pressure to get other countries on board. It wouldn't be a %100 fix, but seems like it would be a simple step in the right direction.
Unless you count china in they group it may not be such a problem.
If businesses in developed countries had to simply pay the cost of cleanup when importing from countries without their own laws in place, it would still be a massive improvement.
I wish we had a ban on Chinese products in that sectors altogether (also Chinese owned) and had incentives to start the production of parts in the country.
I am sick and tired of thinking that even by using networks (which is unavoidable) I will be supporting genocide, forced labour, child labour and other draconian measures Chinese government comes up with.
This is already partially done with Automobiles, for example. Comply with local pollution and safety standards or a lucrative market is closed to your exports.
Yes, in terms of actually solving the problem, we should also see where China's customers/influencers come from. Countries can (and do) demand that other countries have certain working standards and regulations. On pain of tariff or sanction.
A lot of my goods come from basically slave labor and polluters. They have a competitive advantage over companies who don't, so garbage floats and takes over. Countries are complicit when they support or benefit from other countries which do this.
This ignores the influence Western markets and industry have. Western countries issuing the right kind of regulations would have a global effect. Most dirty industry in the West has been outsourced to those countries anyway.
We definitely need laws that require companies to display this information online as well so that ethical shoppers aren't forced to go to the stores to avoid Made in China products.
Yeah, but what I meant by my response is that, in this hypothetical scenario, the products themselves are fine. Nice, clean, safe, recyclable, whatnot. It's the manufacturing process that's polluting. You can't ban a product from being sold in your country on the grounds that manufacturing it in another country is an ecological disaster. Meanwhile, all those jobs are highly desirable (not just for your personal benefit as a politician, but also for the benefit of your constituents and your nation's economy). So there's an incentive to relax the environmental protection rules a little bit. A corporation can use this to play countries off each other - if you stand fast by your existing rules, and your neighbour does not, all the plants and all the jobs and all the economic boost will go to your neighbour, making your country weaker on the international scene.
There's no bribing involved in this scenario. Just plain market competition at nation-state level.
I can imagine a public or private entity that goes around and fines people that do not switch off bad equipment and fine the manufacturer (or bar them from doing business in the country).
You cannot do that on a nation by nation basis as you will just push the pollution to other unregulated nations - although if done globally, this might work.
Originally the thought was to do this on a product by product basis, but unwinding supply chains is effectively impossible.
Actually, it's still pretty tough because some countries buy and rebrand products to slip around tariffs even now.
Could the answer be to disallow companies from selling products to these regimes? Or even just to make it mandatory for companies to consider human rights and laws in their country when operating abroad, so selling to a regime or individual who breaks them would be illegal?
Seems like that could stop stuff like this stone dead, and make it very hard for tyrannical regimes to get any good technology at all.
Importation of goods made with child or slave labor has been illegal for ~100 years. It is just extremely difficult to track and prosecute. If I buy a product on Taobao, what would the proof of no child labor be? What about the components? Like the battery might be made by adults, but where did the lithium come from? You'd need a paper trial going back to natural resource extraction to keep it clean.
Maybe keep it simple and put heavy tariffs on countries that don't police their own child/slave labor.
This sort of ignores the global nature of our supply chains though. Someone can be very green in life here in the EU because all the products they buy are manufactured in China and their environmental impact is externalised and put onto the stats of another country that's trying to meet our demands.
By regulating what's available on markets here we can pressure maufacturers elsewhere.
What is the alternative you would suggest? We have no direct regulatory power over anyone but ourselves.
If it is built in the US, regulating the sale would be redundant, as manufacture would already be illegal, and more ethically made products don't look any different.
If you want, say, textile workers to have humane working conditions, you regulate the textile manufacturing industry, and you want enforcement officers in the garment district, not the retail district.
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