Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

A Toronto, Canada city councillor wants to levy a 30 cent tax on coffee cups, a 25 cent tax on plastic bags, and similar taxes on styrofoam containers. Glenn De Baeremaeker has a good reason:

Keeping nearly three-quarters of the city's waste out of landfill -- not collecting extra cash -- would be the goal of the levies, Mr. De Baeremaeker stressed.

He would insist the money collected be shovelled back into recycling program and other efforts to reduce the amount of Toronto trash that winds up trucked to a Michigan dump.

"In no conceivable way could these taxes and these proposals in any ways address any of the city's fiscal challenges," Mr. De Baeremaker said. "The idea, for example, to tax plastic bags isn't to make money, it's to send a signal to consumers that you are consuming precious natural resources and let's reflect the true cost of doing that."

The only way to have less trash in the form of coffee cups is to have less people buying coffee, so it seems that Mr. De BaereMaeker is proposing an experiment in social engineering to force people to buy less coffee. I don't think people are about to give up their daily fix of Tim Horton's coffee, but the will certainly grumble over a tax that hits lower income folks disproportionately.

The overall impact on the volume of trash will likely be miniscule, but Toronto, with a voracious appetite for cash, will just be generating more tax revenue under the guise of being "green".