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> Just build it into the base taxes that everyone pays

You can also put the cost of disposal into the cost of the item at sale. Either through a deposit (like cans/bottles) or just a flat fee/tax.

Then you encourage people to buy less toxic, easier-to-dispose-of alternatives.

That’s exactly what the WEEE directive is in the UK/EU. I ran a company that manufactured and sold an electrical product and we had to pay an amount based on weight sold per quarter from memory. I have no idea if it’s actually used to help with disposal of end of life electrical waste but we paid a decent amount of 8 years of sales.

In Madrid at least we have “Puntos Limpios”, where consumers can properly dispose of many different kinds of waste, including electrical appliances, for free.

In addition, once a month there is a “punto limpio móvil” on each neighbourhood: a small truck from the city parks on a reserved spot for 2h to get the special waste from the neighbours, also for free.

That sounds fantastic. I'm in London and the lack of easy waste disposal without a car is the only thing that makes me wish I was driving... It's such an own goal that you create an incentive to keep having a car if you want to recycle.

Norway has a tax on drinks containers, and an optional bottle returns scheme, but with a tax refund tied to return rates which means almost everywhere participates in the deposit/returns scheme because its cheaper than paying the tax. I wish that mechanism was extended to a lot more things.

This sounds good until you have to wait 10 minutes on the local return point to get 30 cent back.

You really need to not value your time at all to be willing to participate on those schemes.

Germany had a similar scheme for returning soda bottles when I studied there (no idea if they still do). I would save up a few bottles before bothering to return them. Took a couple of minutes max. Hardly a big effort.

No one is standing in line to return one bottle.

My local grocery store has a similar return system for glass milk bottles. You just turn them in at the register when you check out. Even simpler.

Huh? It typically takes about 10 seconds per bottle during your grocery shopping.

this is the galaxy brain solution

One example is here in Japan, PC manufacturers have a legal duty to collect and recycle any PC they sell https://www.meti.go.jp/policy/recycle/main/admin_info/law/02...

So if you have some old PC you need to get rid of, you just call the PC manufacturer and they send a pre-paid shipping label and box to your home and the mailman comes to pick it up at their expense.

> Where I am it costs $20 to properly dispose of an old can of paint.

That’s a good way to discourage proper disposal.

Modern latex paints are accepted in normal household garbage in most cities if allowed to dry out first, but oil based paints should be collected at proper locations. It’s actually getting hard to find oil based paints for sale, but you want to encourage people to dispose of them properly. When someone discovers 10 old paints in the basement of an old house it shouldn’t cost $200 to dispose of them.

All of the counties I’ve lived in (USA) long enough to have material to dispose of have provided free hazardous waste collection sites. The only hassle was maybe dealing with the government employee who didn’t want to help you do the mandatory sign-in and the minimal paperwork some required.

My current city also has annual hazardous waste pickup days. They’ll advertise in your neighborhood with flyers explaining what they will collect and where to take it. Very convenient to drop it off locally.

Charging people for small scale disposal is a very bad idea.

should be a like a milk bottle deposit scheme, pay $30 up front, get $10 back on disposal

> My current city also has annual hazardous waste pickup days.

One place I lived permitted placing small amounts (there were strict limits) of appropriately packaged hazardous waste (there were detailed instructions) on top of your bin at any time. It didn't apply to everything but it made safely disposing of batteries, fluorescent lights, and various other common household hazards quite convenient.

My pet peeve is that while disposal is free at recycling centres near me, they are all basically built with the assumption that you will have a car. Some won't let you enter on foot, and most are far from public transport.

Yes, where I am in the UK hazardous/electronic waste disposal is free for individuals but you have to take the items to a waste site. I suspect that means many people never bother.

It probably won't surprise you to hear that I'm also in the UK then... And, yes, currently we're lucky enough to have a decent sized shed where things are just accumulating instead because neither of us drive.

They make it free and easy to do these things where I live. But, you have to take it someplace. So, people still improperly dispose stuff. They won't even properly sort things amongst the bins they have sitting next to eachother, labelled on side and lid with stickers showing what belongs in what, in english, spanish, and in picture form.

Yes, and you'll never get those people to do otherwise. So just deal with it, yes everyone has to pay a little more but the alternative is that they dump it somewhere even worse than in the wrong bin.

Japan is crazy like this, in the countryside it's almost impossible to dispose of things easily. All through the autumn after rice harvest the fields just smell like burning plastic because it's just the easiest / cheapest way to get rid of it all.

Construction waste is also a major issue, insanely difficult to dispose of.

The biggest contributors to waste are corporations by many, many orders of magnitude. If you added the tax on these materials at the point of sale then the people who are actually generating this toxic waste would be the ones paying for its (free) disposal.

It's a big waste disposal problem when you've got a magniturde. (I enjoyed the serendipitous typo while it lasted.)

I don't know, my mind turns to enormous flytipping sites like this one: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdew6j2lxplo

I guess it's a kind of business that's behind these, but I don't think they're run by corporations.

In NYC it is free to dispose of such stuff properly (paid for with taxes). Of the sites I've been to, both have been easily accessible without a car. They've been incredibly easy to use: you walk up and either hand your stuff to the employee or put it in the correct bin yourself based on the signs. I've never had to wait in a line, you just walk in, drop your stuff, and go. And yet every week I still see people disposing of their electronics improperly by putting their smashed televisions on the curb for regular trash pick up instead of taking it to a special waste site. Hell is other people.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/what-we-do/programs/special-wa...

Yes, any barrier is too much for some people. Accept that fact, and have the municipal collectors pick up the TV and do the right thing with it. Better than it getting dumped in the woods or an empty lot somewhere.

That sounds pretty difficult. We would need a way to signal to the municipal collectors what each thing is, and they would need to be able to store each type of thing separately. For example, are these batteries lithium, lead, or nimh? Those go into separate bins. What type of paint is it? those goes into separate bins. How are we supposed to indicate that a container contains used motor oil?

The simple trash, recycle, compost stuff works because it is only 3 categories so you can have 3 different colored bags/bins. Adding in the special waste stuff is adding 10+ categories. We'd either need a full rainbow of bins or some special stickers to mark each item (which would be yet-another barrier).

While I'd love at-home pickup, what we really need is for people to just be better.

Exactly - if it's important, make it easy. Our town has an electronics drop-off and the only thing they could do to make it easier is make it open 24hrs, but I understand why it isn't.

Having to take a dead TV 60 miles to pay Best Buy to dispose of it was a non-starter for basically everyone.

If that's what it costs to dispose of it, then that paint should have cost $20 more when you bought it.

Of course, but that is common sense, so difficult for most people with authority.

Would this not in turn cause people to be more wasteful?

The more you try and "fix" the problem by piling on laws, the more you make it cost, and the more demand you create for illegal or questionably legal dumping and the more payoff you create to make it worth it.