For electronics, some states now require a fee at the time of purchase, to be put into a fund and used for future recycling, so the cost of responsible disposal

For electronics, some states now require a fee at the time of purchase, to be put into a fund and used for future recycling, so the cost of responsible disposal is built into the original price: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee Its motivation was a different problem, recycling rates: most people balk at paying a fee at the time of disposal to recycle something. If recycling costs money (as it generally does for electronic waste, which doesn't recover enough valuable metals to pay for the process), then people just dump things in the trash instead, even if that's illegal. Collecting the cost of recycling up front, and then making it free to recycle at the point of disposal, greatly increases how willing people are to put their electronic waste into the right bin. As far as I know that's so far mostly for computers, not appliances, and only in some jurisdictions. How effective it is also depends on how strong the other laws around recycling are: if "recycling" ends up consisting of just shipping the waste to China to be processed in a questionable manner, the up-front price might not be fully pricing in the environmental damage. Overall I think it's a good model, though, to combine responsible-disposal requirements with up-front collection of the funds to do the disposal.