Any chance you could compost the kitchen scraps in your garden?
Any chance you could compost the kitchen scraps in your garden?
Necessary infrastructure extends beyond just providing for recycling- households are going to produce waste that doesn't make economic or environmental sense to recycle, and all the encouragement and financial incentives in the world aren't going to stop that. Encouraging people to be less wasteful is important, but we need to stop demonizing landfills and use of the landfill bins because that sentiment has perverted the whole household recycling process.
It's gotten so bad here that a few months ago, they had city representatives on the radio threatening fines for people that put non-recyclable waste in their bins, as if that's the solution to mixed-recycling being uneconomical. They went as far as to say that it was malicious- that people were putting non-recyclable stuff, like used pizza boxes (their example), in the recycling bins to purposefully sabotage the whole system. The disconnect is huge and at some point the holier-than-thou attitude and the short-sighted laws passed with it are going to blow up in our collective faces.
I'd try to collect payment for disposal earlier. If you pay for disposal when you buy the product, it makes doing the right thing easy. It also makes products with wasteful packaging more expensive right there in the store, encouraging people to buy less wasteful alternatives.