I routinely go out and pick up trash along some of the nearby streets in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, my setup is not nearly as impressive. It's sad to see the amount of trash that people throw. Beer cans, drink cups, cigarette butts, plastic wrappers, beer bottles, etc. I pick up trash because I hate seeing it and the exercise is good for me.
Last year I moved onto a street that had a ton of litter. I lived with it for about a month before I realized how easy it would be to walk a loop and pick it all up. For the first six weeks or so, I would fill two 20L garbage bags and by the next weekend, there would be another 40L of garbage waiting for me. Then something great happened: the amount of litter began decreasing. Soon I only needed to take one bag with me and recently I've been coming home with it only half full. Keeping the street clean has actually led to fewer people littering in the first place. It's a really great feeling to see such an improvement for so little effort and I would encourage anyone who enjoys walking outside to give it a try.
> In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.
The same probably applies to things like littering as well, somewhat.
Broken window theory gets (rightfully, IMO) criticized because it tries to make an unjustified logical leap between crimes of a wildly different degree of severity.
I'm not trying to argue against the premise above that seeing litter makes people more likely to litter; in fact, I agree with it. Humans are monkey-see monkey-do creatures. The problem is that "monkey sees broken window, monkey does murder" is not how this works. It's a weirdly authoritarian way of thinking that suggests that criminality is not only objective, but a tidy spectrum.
The flaw with broken windows theory was that it was used to justify excessive and abusive police actions. Cleaning up trash, turning vacant lots into parks and pleasant spaces, keeping public areas well maintained, and generally making it look like people give a shit about where they live really does make a huge difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ02VLZ_Ey0
I am on the verge of doing something like this along a through-way in our neighborhood. I think I could probably get a lot of buy-in from the community.
I'm also a trash picking up guy, got a bucket and a grabber stick I take on my dog walks.
I do not find it sad but it does give me endless stuff to think about.
One thing is that when people litter (or leave dog poop on the grass) they sort of think they're "getting away with it" because no one will catch them. I realized that's a childish perspective on morality, the reason not to litter is that it improves the quality of your community- not to avoid punishment!
Another thing I think about is how we're all interconnected, and there are a million dimensions where you have to pull your weight or else someone else ends up with your extra burden. This is again especially apparent with children, who innocently leave messes or avoid chores, without realizing that what they're doing is assigning the chore to a parent.
I think of all these people littering as not pulling their weight in the dimension of litter, but that makes me think that in other areas they might be pulling extra weight, like they're in a rush because their employer doesn't pay enough for them to outsource their tasks, or they're using alcohol as a coping mechanism and need to sneak their beers in the car and can't bring the cans in the house to throw them away. And the worst case is someone who is sort of burned out on the web of interconnectedness, and not pulling their weigh in any dimension, being a burden on everyone else. That's kind of sad but it doesn't make me hate those people because I've been that guy at times in my life, and now I can at least pay back the loans I've taken in some small way.
the people never grew to realize the reason not to litter is that it improves the quality of your community- it's not to avoid punishment!
It's very frustrating to see people comment about this stuff on a neighborhood subreddit or next door. It's a predictable cycle. Whether it's people littering or whether there's a windy trash day, people complain about trash on the sidewalk and about how it's a sign the city has gone to the dogs. I will suggest they can pick it up if it bothers them so much, let alone out of a sense civic pride, they act like I took their first born! I just don't get it...
> I will suggest they can pick it up if it bothers them so much, let alone out of a sense civic pride [...] I just don't get it...
It's actually really simple.
Imagine you have a co-worker that doesn't do their job. You complain about it and are told "well, you have time enough to complain, maybe you could take on some of his tasks." Now you're doing the job of two people and the colleague continues avoiding accountability for his incompetence.
It's bully logic. The problem isn't that I'm punching you, it's that you're being too loud in crying about it.
Burdening critics with extra work is not the solution to upstream problems. The problem is people littering, not a lack of people willing to pick it up.
This is like the opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons. If everyone in your neighborhood pitches in and picks up trash, it will be clean. If nobody does, it will inevitably decay. Doesn't even have to be littering; things blow in, accidents happen, trash blows away, stuff happens.
The residents of your neighborhood will collectively decide what kind of neighborhood they live in by the actions they take. Whether you find this morally offensive, morally harmonious, or some complicated other combination doesn't affect the brute fact of the matter.
Thanks, but nothing I said should lead to that conclusion. There will always be incidental debris. It helps when more than just a handful of people bother to clean it up. It also helps when people don't deliberately add to their workload.
It might be the implication, "If it bothers them so much"...
I pick stuff up occasionally but I can't make up for a city of people who don't care to pick up their own trash. If I complain about it and you suggest in anyway that if I cared I should pickup after grown adults who don't care to act in a basic civilized manner I would find that very grating.
I get it. Before I was injured in a car crash I didn't have the grabber stick, and it was such a frustrating, gross experience to pick up trash people left on my parkway- had to touch it with my hand and then carry it in my house to clean it.
I got the grabber stick in physical therapy though, and found a bucket in the alley and it clicked. That made cleaning stuff far more realistic.
I have a small farm on the outskirts of the city where nobody lives. When I'm there I usually pick up other people's rubbish and it gets on my nerves to see that the next week it's full of shit again.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, I think I'm going to look at it differently from now on.
I am considering mounting a bucket and a grabber stick on my paddle surf board. The amount of plastic shit I see in the sea while paddle surfing is depressing.
Any tips on the best gear for picking up trash? Right now my setup is pretty simple, I just have a trash picker, a trash bag, and disposable gloves. I want to me able to pick up more trash per unit time, so while the samurai back baskets are an interesting idea, I'm not sure I'd want to risk putting garbage over my head/face. A lot of trash I pick up is bags of poop so :/
I find a bucket easier to use than a trashbag, but the bucket fills faster. If you really want to do a lot of trash, you might get a rolling bin to bring with you?
It also depends on how many trash cans are around. If there are a few (and you know where to get to them) a bucket can be dumped multiple times.
Otherwise you want something bigger, preferably on wheels. Though you can do the classic where you fill bags and leave them by the road and come back later to pick them up in a vehicle.
You can even get permission from the city to drive down bike paths to pick them up, though a cart on a bike would probably work as well.
Great comment. One disappointment is many people will not outgrow the borrower phase even when they have the resources to do so and become a lender. Also it’s okay if you neither borrow nor lend, it’s neutral.
I saw a reference recently to "plogging" which is a combination of picking up litter and jogging. Think it was a Chinese thing, but may have been Japan.
People picking through trash beats recyclables going to the landfill. (assuming the trash-pickers don't pull trash out of the can and throw it on the ground in their haste to find recyclables, anyway) So from that perspective, I'm glad someone is doing it.
But on the other hand, it's tragic that people are so desperate for the small sums to be had from recycling that they spend their days digging through other peoples' trash like that.
> But on the other hand, it's tragic that people are so desperate for the small sums to be had from recycling that they spend their days digging through other peoples' trash like that.
Not all of them are destitute. There are collectors who now own homes thanks to bottle and can deposits. My neighbors across the street moved in few years ago and I saw the garage open - front to back, side to side, top to bottom PACKED with bags of bottles and cans. Thousands of them. Spoke to their neighbor and they told him collecting bottles paid for most of the house. Few blocks down there's an apartment building with ground level garages and again, one of them is fully packed with bags of bottles and cans - plans in motion. This is in NYC too.
Imagine how clean the planet would be if all packaging had a deposit.
Not really. I think only 10 states have plastic bottle deposits, and I have really no clue if those are convenient for folks. I'm not from one of those states: You could take aluminum cans to get money, but it isn't convenient.
(In my current location, I can just take plastic and aluminum bottles to a grocery store to get the deposit back by feeding them into a machine. And most folks do this)
I haven't seen the "un-vending" machines outside of NY.
We have to take everything to the recycling center, wait in a long-ass line and they pay by weight, not item.
It's not worth my time to bring single bags nor worth the space to hoard them at home so I just trade them to the neighborhood homeless guy for expired dog food and other sundries.
I think that places where I live (Norway) have to take back the bottles that they sell in their store - even gas stations - but the only place I see the machines is at the grocery stores. (Grocery stores are generally smaller but more convenient than they were in the US).
And it is by item - less money for small bottles (single serve soda, for example) and more money for larger bottles (1L of soda or juice). Aluminum is similar.
It does vary quite a bit in implementation, with corresponding differences in results.
In Michigan (10c deposit), grocery stores have dedicated areas for machines that receive the bottles and give you the credit back. I grew up setting cans aside for return (and having dedicated bins for folks parking for sport events, with proceeds going towards e.g. Cub Scouts and similar)
In CA (5c deposit), apparently you have to take your recyclables to a recycle center, where I think they pay based on weight. I've never bothered.
And it is true there will be people picking through public trash cans, in both situations.
I agree with your second statement. I've never known anyone in the US that is employed+housed that keeps their bottles for returns.
On the other hand, in Belgium it's pretty normal to keep your case of empty beer bottles and return them at the grocery store when you go the next time.
There's definitely something cultural at play. I wonder if the strong capitalistic ideals in the US make it seem like a low-return effort or if it's looked down upon like going through trash. We also simply waste a lot of things in the US (food, throw-away culture, fast casual clothing, disposable electronics), so it may just be an extension of that too.
We always saved ours and returned them when I was a kid in Michigan - they were about 10 cents each and were returned to the grocery store where you bought it. I also remember we once had a teacher in high school tell us he made $1000 picking up cans, and a smart-ass kid asked if he reported that on his taxes.
But this varies a lot state-to-state. In San Francisco, it seemed to be the poor with carts picking up cans. (And the recycling company wanted you to report people for digging through the bins.) I think the deposit was rather low there and had no idea where you can return them to.
dunno why you're being downvoted. I had homeless people rummage through my trash. at first I was ok with it but they would just leave it strewn out everywhere like racoons and I'd have to clean it up. so I had to lock it up.
The alternative might be to lock up everything but leave the cans in a separate bag for the people who want to collect them? Aluminum's one of the few things that does get recycled well and it's pretty energy intensive to get new aluminum. That's the one I always try to recycle, plastic and the rest... I'm not convinced it doesn't end up in the landfill anyways.
Aluminum is usually sorted out to recycling. Unless the volume is really low, the economics are there: there's demand for used aluminum, it's easy to sort out, and in many places trash collection has state goals for diversion that may need to be met.
if they had come around and put everything back after, I would have been fine with leaving it separate to make it easier for them. waking up to a massive trash pile strewn about everywhere made me lose all respect for these people.
Ha, ya, you and the rest of society, really going to great lengths to make life harder for the people digging through trash for a nickel a can... I have a feeling maybe that you're really kind of asking for a lot from the people who're probably the least well off in our society... Do you think the person digging through your trash feels respected ever?
> going to great lengths to make life harder for the people digging through trash for a nickel a can.
I hate this bleeding heart crap. As I said before, If they went though it and CLEANED UP after themselves, I woulda turned a blind eye or maybe even set the cans aside in the future. These assholes made me spend my Saturday morning cleaning up trash scattered all over my front yard. You're damn right I'n not going to life a finger to help them.
you ever stop for a second and think that maybe there's a reason no one respects them?
PS: all for expanding the social safety net and creating programs to give people who want a leg up but I have no sympathy for people who Choose to be homeless and be a permanent drain on society. SF already spends more money per capita on homeless than students. enough is enough.
I am reminded of one of Matt Mochary’s teaching: when you have to do a task, which takes away your energy, and cannot be delegated to someone else, them make it “exquisite”.
Next time I have to “pick up trash”, I will try to think “what would these samurai do?”
There are trashcans outside of practically every convenience store, which exist about every 100 feet. They don't expect you to go walking off eating or drinking whatever you just bought. People hang outside the store, eat/drink/smoke, discard their waste and carry on. It's just a different culture and societal expectation.
That was my expectation too, but recent experience at the tail end of COVID (~5 months ago), this was absolutely not the case-- I assume to stop people from congregating during the pandemic.
There are always trashcans in the convenience stores though, especially near the microwaves and coffee machines.
You put it in your pocket and throw it away at home.
IIRC, part of the reason for no trash cans is that eating in public is sort of taboo - you do it at a resto or at home. Food wrappers are quite a lot of trash people need to throw away.
From my last trip to Tokyo I recall vending machines having both garbage and recycling bins. So just keep an eye out for vending machines.
> Food wrappers are quite a lot of trash people need to throw away.
Agreed, but ironically Japan is the country I've visited that was the worst for this. Everything is wrapped, inside something wrapped, inside something wrapped. Each individual piece of candy is wrapped. Then 5 pieces are wrapped together. Then you have multiple of those again in a bag, etc. etc.
Eating/drinking in public isn't a taboo, it's moreso that actively walking while eating or drinking or creating a mess in public is frowned on. Nobody really cares if you're having a drink or snack while stationary standing somewhere that doesn't impede pedestrian right-of-way if you're being tidy.
I've always found this criticism to be overblown. Most conbini have trash and recyling bins out front, and in urban areas there's generally a conbini every few blocks, if not more frequently. It's not uncommon to see recycling bins near vending machines either.
- The convenience stores closest to areas that tend to have a lot of tourists, along with not allowing access to toilets, tend to not have their trash cans out either.
- You have to know to go into a convenience store
- The trash bins near vending machines are for cups, so when you have the rice ball wrapper on you, it's a whole thing.
I do think it's very manageable when you know but It did not really "get" the trash strategy until someone pointed it out to me. Every day somebody is born that doesn't know to walk to the back of the Family Mart to find the trashcan
Society has decided that you shouldn't need to have to throw out trash while out and about. You're not doing something inconceivable, like eating or drinking while walking are you?
Sarcasm aside, eating and drinking in public is considered rude. Every single station will have places for tossing most recyclable, nearly every vending machine has recyclable trash cans for the products they sell, and outside of the most drunken areas the conbinis will have trash cans on the inside for all forms of garbage.
They're less common, but garbage and recycling bins are easily found if you make a modest effort to look for them. They're just less ubiquitous than they usually are in the west.
There's also a structural problem imposed by Japan's rigorous management of solid waste in urban areas. Single-stream disposal practically doesn't exist. If a municipality placed general waste bins on corners (as seen in many western urban areas), they'd have to have folks manually sorting whatever ends up in them, which isn't economical.
This is great. I have started to pick up trash when I am out for walks when I think about it. I realised that the small act of picking up one piece of garbage means you get to protect the rest of the world from that one piece of garbage forever. It's O(1) to pickup but gets benefits for eternity and have infinite gains
I remember recently, one of my friends had to do community service, and picking up trash. They knew a few skills like these, but was yelled at by the manager not to do them.
Reminds me of the brazilian clown Lixolino [0] ("lixo" means trash) who spreads eco and citizenship conscience, mainly to children in vulnerable conditions, by playing with garbage. A work of love.
Samurai were abolished in the 1870's during the Meiji era. It was a gradual process. The Samurai were converted to a new social class called Shizoku which loosely translates to 'Warrior families'
I know it's disappointing, sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
did abraham lincoln have a fax machine? google is clogged fully of reposts of the tweet, but I suspect not. At minimum the samurai would probably have to cross the ocean and send the fax from mainland US, right?
So United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry came to Japan in 1853, with a show of might, to open Japan to outside trade. This led to Japan phasing away Samurai culture in favor of Western law. And the Imperial Military seeking military advances. This led to more political prowess at the Versailles Treat. And gave Japanese Empire a taste of neo-imperialism called colonization. That led to WW2 and finally the atomic bomb.
Ah yes. Well, very slow fuse. He participated in suppressing the samurai uprising in 1877. Ōtsu incident was in 1891. I'm sure there were many other contributing factors. Thanks for explaining.
I love those outfits. They're a great bit of cultural fusion. Denim has always been popular for workwear, and it's interesting to see it in a kimono cut.
it's not just about not littering (which is of course very good to do, else plastics gets in water/ground and in our food, then our cells), but also about not buying anything with plastics (or very rarely), because recycling is not very effective (only 2 iterations and changes of classes of materials)
Common misconception. Japan can be very trashy, especially in big cities. It doesn't help that the government doesn't put public trash bins anywhere, supposedly because they're scared of terrorists putting bombs in them.
Even in the suburbs and countryside, people illegally dump trash all the time because they don't want to pay to dispose of it properly. Anywhere you go, you will see signs imploring, "don't throw away your trash here!" under which are mounds of trash.
It may be true that Japan is on average a bit cleaner than other countries, but not nearly so much as people seem to think.
Littering can be solved easily. Put a 1% deposit on all consumables with a minimum of a dollar and you will never see trash on the street again. (for those unfamiliar, a deposit is a fee that you pay upon purchase that is refunded to you upon bringing back the packaging).
Sounds like a tax that disproportionately punishes the poor. Not everyone has the financial/time flexibility to spend an extra dollar on every consumable until they have the time to return it to the store.
Imagine the person going from the night shift at Walmart to opening a Wendy’s, they’re getting a coffee and a packaged breakfast at a convenience store on the way to work - they need to give up a buck on each item out of their minimum wage income, then stop at a deposit location on their way home in the brief window between shifts and childcare.
I see where you’re going with the idea, but at least in America I don’t think it works in practice with the current state of income and financial stability disparity.
trash also disproportionally punishes the poor. said poor also would benefit from picking up said trash and redeeming the cash. consumables tend to be more unhealthy, which you guessed it, also disproportionally punishes the poor. if we hire more people to manually pick up trash or add more trash cans, that results in more taxes or reduced spending on other things, which, well, you get the idea.
I doubt any meaningful reform on any issue will not disproportionally affect poor people.
this is probably why the government simply does nothing instead due to the endless bike shedding by constituents.!
>if we hire more people to manually pick up trash or add more trash cans, that results in more taxes or reduced spending on other things, which, well, you get the idea
I don't think I get the idea. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that charging a poll tax on the purchase of all consumables is a more efficient and effective way to assist the poor than to provide jobs for unemployed people to pick up trash? Introducing such a policy would add a flat tax to tons of the purchases in our economy, I think declaring outright it's the best solution for the impoverished demands a little more supporting evidence than logical sounding rhetoric.
>the government simply does nothing
I guess it depends when and where you grew up, but in my lifetime litter improved significantly compared to how it was when I was growing up in the 90s in Connecticut, and from what I understand it was the result of government-funded marketing campaigns and increased fines and enforcements for littering on public roadways. "Don't Mess with Texas" actually started as a government-funded anti-littering campaign.[0]
Neither of us are in the government (as far as I know), so I think all we can really do right now is discuss our bike-shed designs for solving this problem. If you have any information about why you hold these opinions, I'd be interested to read it - otherwise I don't think we have much to talk about.
> I don't think I get the idea. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that charging a poll tax on the purchase of all consumables is a more efficient and effective way to assist the poor than to provide jobs for unemployed people to pick up trash?
I did not claim that a poll tax (which again is called a deposit fee) is more efficient than providing jobs for unemployed people to pick up trash.
In any case bottle deposits are already known to be effective:
In any case your entire argument could be made about taxes in general. why tax poor people at all? why should the poor pay sales tax? tax does disproportionally affect the poor. if so, how do you plan on making up the revenue? I would assume taxing the middle class and rich? the mere math is such that any sweeping action will disproportionally affect the poor simply because most Americans are poor. the only viable thing then is to do nothing.
I misread your comment - I assumed you were pointing out that alternatives would be less effective than charging a minimum of a buck for every consumable purchases, but rereading it I see that was just my assumption.
Retail sales tax is not universally implemented across the United States, so is at least not essential to the financial solvency of a government. My objection isn't to the general notion of taxing poor people, but of introducing taxes that disproportionately burden the poor. A poll tax disproportionately burdens the poor because it introduces a flat bill paid by everyone regardless of income. A tax introducing a flat bill on all consumable purchases disproportionately burdens people who make more consumable purchases and who have less opportunity to return consumable purchases for the deposit, in addition to disproportionately burdening people for whom 10% or a minimum of $1 is a bigger and more essential portion of their daily income.
Your source from the Container Recycling Institute is supportive of bottle deposits, but bottle deposits are usually 5c a container, not 10% or a minimum of $1, are far less universal than a tax across all consumables, and only implemented in 10 states so far.
>In any case your entire argument could be made about taxes in general.
Only if you simplify it to the point of reducing it to a strawman. I'm trying to be as specific about my critique here as possible: I don't think charging everyone a "a 10 percent or at least a dollar deposit" on every consumable is going to reduce litter effectively without disproportionately burdening the poor, and I think proposing such an egregiously steep and broad tax as a reasonable policy ignores the realities of the people it would disproportionately punish.
Edit:
>any sweeping action will disproportionally affect the poor simply because most Americans are poor. the only viable thing then is to do nothing.
I would request some evidence on this one, too. 55% of workers are paid hourly, and only 1.5% are on minimum wage. Obviously the poverty line excludes a lot of people we would probably consider "poor" but that's still 11.4% of the country. From what I can tell, this claim and your defeatist conclusion from it have no basis, like your earlier claim that the government "does nothing" to address litter.
your fixation on $1 in particular is irrelevant. your entire point stands even if it's 1 cent. do you support deposit fees or not? do you support poor people paying any taxes or not? that's the crux of the issue.
not to mention, again, it's not a tax, it's a fee, that is given back to you if you want the money back. poor people inherently would be most incentivized to return the packaging thus making the issue moot and your issue irrelevant. or, more pleasantly, stop the consumption of consumables such as soda and fast food that affects them the most anyway in the form of disproportionally high rates of diabetes, obesity and low life expectancy.
I'm somewhat acquainted with the German deposit system. While I don't know if littering decreased after it was implemented, I saw a lot of people leaving their bottles and cans in parks on purpose so bottle collectors can get them, as a kind of donation I guess? The deposit is just about a quarter though, not a dollar.
(Also I have 666 reputation right now, please don't ruin it)
Unfortunately I moved out of Germany but I loved this system. In Dresden-Neustadt [quite funky party areal], it was quite common to leave beer bottles or alcopop cans neatly outside of the trash bins. So people who make money from collecting them don't have to dig in trash. Pure humanity.
I used to work at FAANG there, one of the managers was a fun guy. For a month he committed to do the same thing as the people who collect cans - every 04:00am he went around town, collecting bottles and cans. Turns out you can easily make 100-200eur a day with this. But it's a highly competitive business.
>So people who make money from collecting them don't have to dig in trash. Pure humanity.
I've lived in Germany, and this was one of the things I quickly adopted after seeing the locals doing it. An interesting anecdote is that can/bottle collectors always approached me asking if I'm finished with my drink (I had a drink outside almost daily), but I never felt threatened or anything. They were generally super polite, I'd usually reply with "I'll leave it here" and they went along their way. Very different experience than anywhere else!
> it was quite common to leave beer bottles or alcopop cans neatly outside of the trash bins.
There even was/is a bit of a campaign to promote that, e.g. with slogans on bottle labels. Some places also have started putting up small "bottle racks" with trash cans.
Isn't this a net good thing? The objective is to make sure the object is returned and either recycled or disposed of. It doesn't matter if someone casually returns their own bottles or one guy walks around with a cart and collects 1000s of them. They all get returned.
AFAIK German estimates are that ~95% are returned. 0.25€ is for single-use containers, multi-use containers (e.g. glass beer bottles that get refilled) are 0.08€ or 0.15€ depending on type.
in that scenario why should you get anything? rip it in a way that leaves it in one piece (albeit ripped) and return it. people will get with the program soon enough. after all the entire point of what I propose is to fix the behavior.
Okay, but who is checking your wrapper to make sure it's not ripped? If I bring in a bag of two hundred candy wrappers, does someone sit there and carefully check each one? This doesn't seem easily automatable. Is this a small candy bar wrapper, or half of a big candy bar wrapper?
It's not an occasional wrapper. It's the block of cheese I finished off when cooking dinner yesterday, the container of mushrooms I emptied, the bag of tortillas. Most household trash just changed from "toss in the trash and it gets dumped somewhere" to "bring to someone to check each item for completeness"?
I'm sure we'd end up with a lot less single-use packaging as a result, but we use single-use packaging for a reason and your proposal amounts to a near-ban. Let's not pretend this is a simple "just charge a deposit and littering stops". It's "charge a deposit, discover the deposit is non-viable, and single-use packaging as a whole stops".
Put a QR code on it, if it scans then you get the deposit? I would've suggested using the existing barcode but since they're 1-dimensional they could be ripped many times and each piece would still scan...
My proposal is hardly a ban, simply charging people for the externality. It would be up to the manufacturer to think of an appropriate mechanism to allow for deposits. Simplest way would be to use cardboard lined with plastic but that has its own issues
If the overhead is zero, it's merely charging people for the externality. If the overhead is prohibitively high, it's effectively a ban. I don't see any explanation of how to keep the overhead—in this case, the cost (time or money) of managing returns—low enough to be viable.
The other commenter's "just put a QR code" helps a lot, but it still makes household trash much more burdensome than the current "put it in a bin and someone collects it" system. How much would you pay to not have to take your kitchen trash somewhere and scan each piece? That's the overhead here.
The system exists in NYC. It is terrible. Sure there is a profession of people going through garbage and picking certain trash. But I pay for a whole bunch of bottles. and then i throw them away in my house. i don't go to the nearest depositry. it hurts me.
You could just return the bottles? The same system exists in Germany - I would just collect bottles in a crate or Ikea bag, and then when full take it to the return machine in the supermarket.
I don't know what the implementation is like in the USA, but perhaps it's an inconvenient implementation that's to blame, rather than the entire concept?
I think we don’t treat our trash with so much care. The most amount of recycling work we do is separate it into bins and keep it crushed so that it all fits. Do I Really want another bin collection for a bunch of bottles that are going to be returned for money? it’s just not worth it. And do I want to drive up the trash to a different facility than the one that comes to my house for collection? That’s more work. Probably more gas too.
> And do I want to drive up the trash to a different facility than the one that comes to my house for collection? That’s more work. Probably more gas too.
I guess a big difference is that in Europe, I can just walk 5 minutes to the nearest supermarket and deposit the recycling there. I think if the basic infrastructure is set up correctly, recycling is easy. It's the same amount of effort as throwing away non-recyclable waste.
sounds like you should stop buying it if it hurts you and switch to reusable containers. I do agree though, that the way it is implemented isn't great. ideally every store that collects a deposit fee would also be a place to give back the item.
In Denmark, small shops must refund at least the bottles they sell. Normal or large shops must refund all deposit bottles and cans.
Most people take the empties to a supermarket. People drinking in a public place often leave them for bottle collectors (often homeless etc) to gather.
