7 ms·

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 unfa

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).

neilv 3y ago
I like the idea of (mostly) tying it to inflation. (US 5 cents beverage container deposit made more sense in the 1970s than in 2023.)
lkbm 3y ago
If I rip my candy bar wrapper in half, it seems non-trivial to determine how much to give me for each half.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  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.
  - nathancahill 3y ago
    Correct. No one crushes empty soda cans in Michigan because you lose the deposit.
  - lkbm 3y ago
    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".
    - zanecodes 3y ago
      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...
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      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
      - lkbm 3y ago
        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.
qiqitori 3y ago
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)
- detaro 3y ago
  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.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    In Denmark it's 92% https://danskretursystem.dk/en/sustainability/ https://danskretursystem.dk/en/sustainability/
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  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.
- alfanick 3y ago
  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.
  - 3y ago
gwbas1c 3y ago
In MA we tried to raise the bottle / can deposit via a ballot measure. It went over like a loud fart in a crowded church. (I voted for it because so many homeless and poor people collect bottles and cans for income.)
mustacheemperor 3y ago
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.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  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.!
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    >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. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas
nashashmi 3y ago
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.
- dkdbejwi383 3y ago
  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?
  - nashashmi 3y ago
    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.
    - dkdbejwi383 3y ago
      > 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.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  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.

neilv 3y ago

I like the idea of (mostly) tying it to inflation. (US 5 cents beverage container deposit made more sense in the 1970s than in 2023.)

lkbm 3y ago

If I rip my candy bar wrapper in half, it seems non-trivial to determine how much to give me for each half.

endisneigh 3y ago
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.
- nathancahill 3y ago
  Correct. No one crushes empty soda cans in Michigan because you lose the deposit.
- lkbm 3y ago
  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".
  - zanecodes 3y ago
    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...
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    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
    - lkbm 3y ago
      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.

qiqitori 3y ago

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)

detaro 3y ago
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.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  In Denmark it's 92% https://danskretursystem.dk/en/sustainability/ https://danskretursystem.dk/en/sustainability/
sidewndr46 3y ago
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.
alfanick 3y ago
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.
- 3y ago

gwbas1c 3y ago

In MA we tried to raise the bottle / can deposit via a ballot measure. It went over like a loud fart in a crowded church. (I voted for it because so many homeless and poor people collect bottles and cans for income.)

mustacheemperor 3y ago

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.

endisneigh 3y ago
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.!
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  >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. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas

nashashmi 3y ago

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.

dkdbejwi383 3y ago
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?
- nashashmi 3y ago
  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.
  - dkdbejwi383 3y ago
    > 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.
endisneigh 3y ago
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.