No, I am in favor of anti-litter laws. I had interpretted your argument to imply imposing the cost at the time of disposal, but I realize this is not the only way the cost can be imposed. I see your additional comment, but I'm not sure a straight up tax is the best solution either. If the taxes are levied indirectly then there is very little incentive for any parties to change their behavior. Any effect of behavior on the actual tax rate would be slow and dilute. If you levy the tax at the point of sale it is better, because now consumers are incentivized by price to select eco-friendlier goods and manufacturers are incentivized by the same mechanism to produce them. This solution is still lacking however, because should the consumer ultimately decide to dispose of an item, they've already paid the environmental fee, so why go through the effort of disposing it properly? It seems to me a workable approach might be to impose a materials based "environmental tax" at the point of sale but credit it back when the item is brought to an appropriate recycling center, just like a milk bottle deposit.

I think maybe we seem to be disagreeing because I see it as a feature that

> If the taxes are levied indirectly then there is very little incentive for any parties to change their behavior.

I don't care about any particular behavior per se [in the context of this discussion!]. If the costs of cleaning up people throwing plastic away are being met by a tax, why would one care whether plastic continues to be used for new items and people continue to throw it away?

It's possible that the most efficient behavior – in terms of physics – is to make things out of certain materials and then throw them away after some point. It's not obvious that reuse or recycling are always more efficient than simply 'wasting-and-remaking', given all of the other elements of our environments (like bacteria, fungi, ambient energy, etc.).

> If the costs of cleaning up people throwing plastic away are being met by a tax, why would one care whether plastic continues to be used for new items and people continue to throw it away?

Because it's possible that the costs are not entirely monetary. I agree that there is more nuance to this debate, though. In my opinion one-time use objects made of plastic are appropriate in some contexts (medical care, for instance) and less appropriate in others (plastic silverware).

People get into this really nasty habit of thinking law exists in a vacuum free from the existence of human nature. This is sounding a lot like a gun control argument.

Instead, think of this from a goal based perspective. Your goal is to reduce stuff getting thrown in the trash.

Therefore, you want to encourage recycling.

Making recycling expensive harms your goal. You want to encourage people to recycle, not discourage. Don't do it, then.

Trying to force people to recycle doesn't work. It's economically infeasible to track down who threw that oil can in the curbside bin. Negative reinforcement being off the table, use positive reinforcement.