How to Fix Litter
willing to shake bad ideas for long enough that sometimes interesting things
fall out.
But the internet is tough for ideas people. I had an idea for a TV show where
CEOs try to open their own packaging, but then I
Googled “tv show where ceos open their own packaging,” and screw
me, there’s a stupid Reddit post with the exact same idea.
Pre-internet, I would have happily regaled you with
my entertaining CEO humiliation TV idea, never knowing that someone else had
had the same thought. A bunch of people, probably. I would have suspected.
But I wouldn’t have known.
Now I know, and it’s not just ruining great ideas for panel shows with a
surprise redemption arc: You can’t think of anything without a quick search
revealing that someone else thought of it first. By now
every half-baked thought anyone ever had has been fingered into a phone,
and the search algorithms are good enough to find it.
I have therefore decided never to research anything again. The internet is too
consumptive anyway. Consumptive. I’m not sure that’s a word. But I’m won’t check.
I’m just going to assume I created something brilliant and on point there.
So here is my next idea, which I also will not research: We should fine companies
for litter. I know what you’re thinking: Why do all Max’s ideas start with,
“Fine companies?” Because inequality, that’s why. That’s beside the point.
We should fine them for litter. Not littering. Fines for littering is
already a thing. We need to fine them for having their logo wind up in a
gutter, no matter how it got there. For example, if I wander through the city
with a meal, discarding Coke cans and McDonald’s wrappers, we should fine
Coke and McDonald’s.
You might be thinking this sounds a little unfair. Like,
what did Coke and McDonald’s do wrong here, exactly. I’ll tell you: They failed
to take accountability for the total footprint of their business.
They made an external detrimentality.
External detrimentalities are when a business finds a way
to make someone else pick up the tab for some of their product’s cost, e.g.
by dumping factory waste in a river, or pretending nicotine is good for
you, or passing down catastrophic climate change to the next
generation. They’re also how to tell the
difference between economist rationalists and corporate shills, because economists want to
eliminate external detrimentalities, while people who have been subsumed into
the corporate overmind think they’re a smart way to make money.
There you go. An app to send snaps of discarded golden arches to a central authority,
which issues fines, which incentivizes McDonald’s to stop people strewing trash
all over my street. That’s a solid idea, which no-one has ever thought of. Or they have,
and it was trialed in some city somewhere, and it went terribly, possibly because people
were deliberately dropping litter to get companies fined.
But those are just details. I’m not going to figure out
every last little thing. I’m an ideas man. Person.
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Interesting take. If you think about it, branded trash is a form of advertising. Sure, you see a McDonald's bag on the ground and immediately think about the A-hole who left it there, but you also think "I wonder when the McRib is coming back?" So, making companies pay a fine for their trash advertising isn't that far fetched. If they want to avoid the fines, they just use non-branded, generic bags and containers.
Really like this. Maybe a good way to prevent companies from just passing responsibility onto the consumers and instead come up with waste-reduction ideas that anyone can follow.
I just wanted to point out that people aren't always the ones doing the littering. When garbage is collected during a windy period it can blow away without reaching the inside of the truck. This all coincided with the loss of two jobs on every garbage truck due to the advent of the One Armed Bandit(OAB). A truck designed to collect rubbish without the need for additional staff, with it's hydraulic arm that lifts and tips the bin up and overhead into a hole in the top of the compactor.
Before the OAB was invented the garbage collection team was a truck driver and two garbologists who loaded wheely bins on the back. If anything flew about they picked it up. This wasn't as frequent an occurrence as with the OAB because the chute that swallowed the contents of the wheely bin was protected from the worst of the wind by it's design.
The method the OAB arm lifts the bin up high, it rotates upside down and the contents fall into the compactor chute. Strong winds just blow light loose rubbish out again, the truck driver does NOT get out of his truck to collect any of it.
I love your idea Max, but Eric is right those buggers will just use generic packaging to avoid such fines or taxes.
Soon there'll be bar codes on everything sold which will make your empty Ho-Ho wrapper easy to track back to you. Instead of fines it'll go against your social credit rating. Use cash? That'll disappear sooner than we think.
