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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

I played with the thought that municipalities should hold the producers of the product (packaging) that can be foud in the streets responsible for the cleanup cost.

Some kind of data needs to be collected by a team like this team an based on that data the offending brands get bills.

Besides that I think littering could benefit from heavy fines, the same way speeding tickets helped with traffic safety.

Basically a near little free environment should be our aim, I do not see why cannot make this happen.

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25 cents deposits on cans and bottles did wonders in Germany. You can leave them anywhere in the city and they'll be gone within five minutes. This also turned out to be a surprisingly effective, although somewhat sad, wealth redistribution scheme.

It's unfortunately not realistic to do for every kind of wrapper. Although maybe a weight-based rough measurement might work: I. e. a cents/gram of packaging, and your recycling is spot-checked for contamination. It seems slightly too convoluted, invasive, and draconian even for me, a German green. But might be a possible application of AI ("estimate the number of product wrappings in this heap").

States in the USA have been doing this for years too. 10 cents for bottles and cans in California, and you just don't really see them on the street for this reason. What you do see is... everything else.

Part of the issue is the people collecting the 10 cent bottles have dumped out the rest of the trash in a hunt for 10c and a possible meal.

10ct on cigarette buds!

Why would you hold the companies that produce the products responsible when they have no control over what someone does with the packaging of their products?

Companies have choice over how they package their products, and have a number of levers to change behavior: they might reduce the extent to which they provide packaging (does that single piece of fruit need to be wrapped in plastic?), or offer incentives to customers to provide their own packaging (eg cups at coffee shops), or might provide incentives for packaging to be returned instead of trashed (deposits on cans and bottles).

And at the end of all that, if a company still produces products that we know will probably end as packaging litter... hell yeah, charge them (and implicitly the littering consumers) for that negative externality.

I don't think that companies should be held responsible for crimes committed using their products.

Why not directly punish the person who committed the crime?

Because it's easier to punish the people who enable it.

I don't understand why you see companies packaging their products as enabling littering.

If a company produces a product, and then someone uses that product to commit a crime, did the company enable the criminal?

Do you apply this reasoning to any other crimes?

Agree with it or not, this is already normal practice. San Francisco has a "Cigarette Litter Abatement Fee" of $0.85 per pack.

https://sftreasurer.org/cigarette

San Francisco already does this with cigarettes. An eighty five cent tax per pack is levied specifically for this purpose. So around 4.25 cents per cigarette. I don't see why this could not be applied to other problematic litter sources.

https://sftreasurer.org/cigarette

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