Tobacco companies must pay for clean up of discarded cigarettes in Spain

I'd structure it like this:

- The government establishes a baseline program that recycles 100% of current packaging waste (this requires "mining" existing discarded plastic, glass, etc. from the environment).

- They send a bill to product manufacturers weighted by how much packaging and of what type each manufacturer produces (rounding the fee for small producers to zero, so coke and pepsi end up subsidising small companies).

- Manufacturers can proportionally reduce their bill by recycling post consumer packaging of the same type they produce (and same supply chain -- no fair buying up easy stuff like McDonalds cups, then dumping plastic into super markets).

The last point creates an economic incentive for capitalism to reduce the cost of recycling.

There's something like this EU wide: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

Basically it makes anyone who introduces recycleable packaging (paper, plastic, metal, ...) into the market (domestic production or via import) pay a licensing fee by amount and type of packaging material introduced. This should incentivize companies to reduce packaging overall, use more recyclable types of packaging and reimbursement can be used for cleanup and recycling (the details are more complicated obviously).

"Service packaging" such as cups, burger wrappers and bags that are filled at point of sale and handed to end users are generally included in the system.

Anecdotally I've seen probably thousands of discarded cigarette butts and maybe a handful of McDonalds trash. I see more "nips" (small alcoholic bottles) than fast food trash from any vendor.

In the same vein, companies like Amazon should be required to setup recycling and reuse programs for all their packaging that end up in landfills.