“Have you ever wondered what actually happens when you don’t follow the recycling rules properly? When you make a mistake and recycle something that cannot be recycled? Or put glass into a container meant for paper recyclables? Is the sifting really that important?
Yes. If your recycling habits aren’t up to snuff, it may mean that it all ends up in the landfill.
That’s right, if recycling is poorly mixed or mishandled, it just gets dumped. Secondary sifting can prove too costly and time consuming, so it is often easier for centers to just trash mismanaged recyclables. But what about when you mix one little glass jar with a big box of plastics? Depending on the features of your local recycling center, inappropriately mixed items in the waste stream can clog up machinery, resulting in even greater costs and manpower hours.”
I have no doubt that many fast food customers do their best to take care of their rubbish in the correct way. But that convenience ultimately comes with a cost regardless of how that rubbish is disposed of (a lot of fast food packaging is impossible or unprofitable to recycle)
Thanks for that link, I have been invited to talk to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into Recycling and Waste Management partly on the basis of my reference to utilising behaviour change knowledge and approaches.
You may well have hit on the main way to encourage these careless morons to stop littering.
We no longer see any litter which attracts a refund; which is sad in a way, as at least it could have offset the effort of cleaning up our front yard.
However, paper bags, hamburger wrappers and boxes, drink containers, and straws continue to litter our driveway or front lawn or nature strip. An additional cost on each item MAY encourage users to dispose of their litter responsibly. At the very least, it would mean that those of us who have to clean up after these inconsiderate idiots would at least get some recompense for doing so.
It might help, although with a 700m long verge, I only find crushed cans and broken bottles of recent vintage. No cash for either?
The local bottle shop can substitute for FF.
Make the refund a round 100cents, as someone else has suggested. And have the sellers exchange the empty for the refund or towards a new sale, just as in the old days.
The Coke truck used to backload the empties, effectively a free trip?
Take the government out of the refund process, and make the retailers and suppliers responsible first hand.
It’s another way to encourage FF outlets to find ways to minimise their waste generation, having to handle it all.
And if you can only get your Macas refund on waste at a Macas store, what price loyalty?
I often find the same in the urban areas where we live as outlined above. The marketing associated with the rollout of the scheme seemed to indicate that containers subject of a refund/deposit would no longer be waste…which is not the case. They would have been better indicating that the scheme produces high value, low contamination, recovered recycled materials which may have other gone to landfill…give one a warm feeling rather than potentially overstate the litter outcomes.
The other challenge is what would a fast food meal deposit apply to…to the wrappings, straws, servettes, salt and pepper satchets, toothpicks and their packaging, drink cups and lids, left over food etc etc?
Does each individual items have a deposit or is it for all products sold as part of the purchase?
Who would check that all containers, wrapping, left over food is returned and what happens if half isn’t…is the deposit still returned even though the remaining half could have become litter?
As one can seen, the impracticalities and challenges of collecting a depost and refunding it.
Maybe a polic/regulation could be introduced that like shopping trolleys, fast food must not leave the establishment and must be consumed on site. Is this fair to consumers and how about other meals which also cause litter (prepackaged foods from supermarkets, bakeries, pie vans etc?
It is very different to the container deposit schemes which have been rolled out as the deposit is attached to the container, and the community (or government) is responsible for tbe management and adminstration of the schemes. Would the government be responsible for fast food (or any other potential sources of litter such as cigarette butts) desposit schemes?
We might all end up working for the government assisting with the implementation and administration of such schemes.
It might depend on where you are standing at the time?
No solution is perfect and some versions, usually in hindsight, are more likely than others to succeed.
The choice of any solution, in the knowledge one might not succeed in full, is often avoided.
Rather some would prefer no action or absolute certainty. At present it appears except respectfully for those in this discussion, the FF waste problem is floating on the ‘not mine, it’s someone else’s problem’ cloud.
Is there any harm in insisting all fast food wrappers, bags, straws etc have a prominent message from the brand? Please think of others, the environment etc and dispose of …thank you for caring!
I prefer in this instance to see how something might be made to work, than why not. Call one option a waste tax as has been suggested and give it to Community Groups to organise street waste collections.
I doubt the solution is in regulation and enforcement with the end users, with perhaps a few exceptions. Cigarette butts are one exception. A fine is too simplistic. A week on community service butt duty might be the go. Of course a total ban on smokes would remove the source of the waste and is a more effective remedy to prevent the waste.
Socially,
I well remember communist party like school teachers driving students forward against the masses of school yard litter as some kind of penance for lost wrappers and stray apple cores.
Not being one of the everyday offenders, the guilty parties needed to increase their stealth skills to escape peer reprisals.
Sure SEP is part of it, much like the collective attitude to industrial scale pollution, individually we say we don’t like it but together we permit it due to inaction. But there is more to it.
I live up a country track that leads nowhere, there are half a dozen house further up. Yet I regularly see fast food litter on the road, bright coloured food boxes, drink cans, etc, despite being at least 40 km from the nearest outlet. Some sources like Maccers is more like 70 km. Somebody saves their rubbish on the highway and then when they get near home opens the car window and tosses it. All these houses have a garbage service, their wheelie bin is typically near where they park their car as it has to be taken up to the gate once a week. They can wait long enough to not toss it on the highway where they might get caught but they can’t wait to get home and bin it.
We have the face that says littering is bad but if it’s out of sight and not much chance of being penalised or embarrassed in public the other face of the two is shown. That is chie-en lit (as De Gaulle put it) another national pastime.
A short video about a UK man who is giving up on collecting plastic waste from UK beaches because the problem isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse.
Sounds like an excellent plan to me! (BTW that link, talk about a site loaded with click bait! All avoided of course:) )
I live about 34km from the nearest house of the evil clown, yet their rubbish is plentiful around my area, 10c deposit or not hasn’t made any noticeable difference. There were people driving around collecting CDS items for a while, but for many items it was a case of looking at it and then dropping back on the ground due to dents in the can, or faded bottle labels etc, as there is no refund available for them. That reduced the amount for a while, but it keeps on accumulating, even out to nearly 100km from the nearest FF place.
I think it really does say a lot about the mentality of some people who frequent the FF chains.
I’m all for car rego printing on containers. Either that or make the deposit something meaningful, like $1.
Arguments about people not being able to afford it just don’t cut it with me. If you recycle, the total cost is $1, which you will get back. It is only expensive for litterbugs.
Fining these litterbugs could go towards employing people to clean up the countryside, which is a like a garbage tip in some places- especially obvious in the drought with no roadside grass to hide it.
@PhilT It will be the outcry about privacy that will be sounded that pollies won’t like so they won’t take action. The answer is simple but hard politically perhaps.
@gordon Most items that are not being recycled are things like straws, cup caps, bottle tops, cups, bags, wrappers, boxes and these don’t have refunds attached. If they had a value on them for returning I’m sure we would see a lot less litter. Make it 10c, make it 20c,50c, make it a $1 even but at any of those points there will be those willing to go the extra mile to recover the value. Put a refund on cig butts and I’m sure most wouldn’t throw them away, they would be keen to get money back towards their next inhale and if they did throw them then a pick up market would develop. 20 butts to the dollar perhaps.
It is a great idea, but, the same fools that litter will possibly also tear off the printed/sticker showing the licence plates before discarding.
An option, but possibly never achievable would be that any products sold are sprayed with licence plate numbers all over any piece of packaging using see through ink (similar to the high speed barcoding technologies) whereby any piece of packing can be used to identify the litterer. The only down side is there would be outcry as unsealed packaging containing food may be affected by the ink spray.
The other option is to install surveillance cameras in known littering hotspots and get the regos from captured video.
The cost of printing the rego details would be high so instead why not just put a value on refunding the litter? Would it be so onerous that it kills the market? I don’t think so and it may increase sales of their products to the people who collect the thrown away articles and return them for cash.
Same could be said for the videoing…once a spot is known then it will require either moving the cameras or new cameras and so on it goes. Why not just impose a refund policy on the waste. A bag or a cup a straw etc each have a value set for returning to a store or recovery point. It would reduce the usage by the FF joints and users would be much more inclined to return the used waste at the end. Straws wouldn’t be so easy to obtain nor would they be so likely to be discarded when a value has been placed on them. Make bottle caps required as part of the bottle refund scheme or a reduced refund if not included.
It is possibly a bit like speed cameras, yes once the location is known, everyone slow down…but they are effective if the location moves randomly and unexpected.
With litter, its concentration is likely to be closer to the outlet or at nearby parking areas (such as local carparks) so these areas could easily be targetted.
If the cameras are randomly located an changed regularly, then the likelihood that one over time will be caught increases.
It could be an effective behaviour to deter littering.
As outlined elsewhere, notional deposits such as 10, 20 cents doesn’t change behaviour. Higher deposits possibly would, but would be unpalatable to consumers, the outlets and its administration. What is covered by a deposit…straws?..bottle caps?..servettes or their wrappers?..salt and pepper wrappers?..product lids?..these also cause litter and are frequently littered. If ir was effective every possible items and its subproduct (such as lids, straws, plastic wrapping) vould need its own deposit. It would be a challenging system to administrater to prevent any litter (such as one throwing something small out the car window).
What are the odds a camera would catch the act in progress and what would trigger it? Constant ‘footage’ reviewed by an AI application reviewed by a human? If one then fines the vehicle owner does litter need to get added to the road rules for penalty units and points or will littering laws remain separate? And how does that work if the vehicle owner claims he was not driving- same as a speed infringement?
Of the simple options moving to bag printers with the vehicle rego emblazoned all over it, not just once or on a sticker, seems the most likely to be feasible as well as contribute to changed behaviour by the miscreants. The fine could even be printed on the dirty litter Although attributing the litter to the vehicle own has the same issues as above it would at least remove the camera and human verification steps, and if ‘nobody did it’ there could be fingerprints.
It might not be a perfect solution, but from my view it has many merits as well as being feasible although businesses would probably push back quite strongly on having to install bag printers - so for a transition maybe a stick on would have to suffice. As equipment got replaced the new would have to conform so a longer term project.
The Golden Arched home of the clown and its competitors could even digitally add targeted promotions to the packaging interspersed with the rego or customer loyalty ID for walk in customers.
The recent ‘Monopoly’ promotion by the clowns sponsor and the emphasis on customers using registered apps for all future purchases certainly adds a unique opportunity.
No need for a cash refund scheme. Personalised packaging and a unique one in ten chance to win when you return your waste through a smart scanning Clown faced waste recovery station.
Cameras are used for illegal fly tipping in many SEQ council areas. There is an established and robust processes to ensure the responsible party is issued the infringement notices.
If a passenger litters, it could be the same as for seatbelts where the driver is also responsible for ensuring that passengers don’t litter.
Although attributing the litter to the vehicle own has the same issues as above it would at least remove the camera and human verification steps, and if ‘nobody did it’ there could be fingerprints.