A system I like is you are charged a significant amount per bottle say $5 extra, if recycle it you get it back, if not, you loose the $5. Also this should not stop at you giving the bottle to the recycling center, they won't get the $5 back until the actually recycle it not ship it somewhere or dump it. This could be adjusted to have a processing fee included so you pay $5.05 and get back $5.00 so the recycle gets gets $5.05 when they recycle it.
The fee has to be significant, very few people are going to go out of their way for 5 cents.
Meh, we have a system like that right now. In many states there's a redemption for recyclable cans and bottles that is built into the cost of the product. You pay an additional $.60 for the six-pack and get $.10 back when you return each bottle. That may not be worth it to most, but some (i.e., poor) people are happy to pick up returnables and redeem them for the cash. The whole point of this system (which started in the 1960s or 1970s) was to encourage people to return their bottles rather than throwing them out. It's had some effect, but not a ton because of a number of flaws: - It's not nationwide because 'states rights' so that bottle I can return in NY is trash in IA - The amount is minimal and most can't be bothered for such a trivial amount - The systems available for redemption are convoluted, difficult and time-intensive meaning that even people who DO want to recycle don't have the time People will recycle if it's made easy enough and worth their while. In my state there is a redemption system, but returning containers is so time consuming and so prone to errors (some machines won't take some containers) that's it's not worth the time or effort. I'm lucky enough that there's a little old Asian lady who goes down my street early on recycling days and who will take all my returnables for the $3-$6 she'll be able to get for them. Hell, I'd pay her that much to take them away for me. At the same time, my municipality (but not my state or county) have a single-stream recycling program where anything recyclable (including those redeemable containers) can be thrown into one big bin to be picked up twice a week. The city literally saved millions the first year they implemented this because the amount of crap people threw out that the city had to pay to be carted away to the landfill plummeted. Now about 30% of the city's waste ends up in the recycle bins which a company pays the city to cart away. There's an open question about how much of this actually gets properly sorted and recycled and another even bigger question of how much this makes a difference to our blatantly unsustainable first-world lifestyle, but at least we get better participation than the next city over where residents have to sort their recycling before putting it out on the curb. Most just don't bother.
I'm often depressed at these news stories that bemoan the loss of jobs in the face of technological improvement.
America is suffering from a labor shortage. We need to move people out of low wage dead-end jobs in retail, and into more productive jobs so businesses can expand and the economy can grow.
What should depress you is seeing a cashier repetitively scanning and bagging products. It is pathetic that a human mind is wasted on such drudgery.
Of course I'm depressed at seeing humans waste their time on drudgery jobs that could easily be automated! Hell, the dehumanization of modern jobs has always been a societal concern - just look at Chaplin's Modern Times. There's a certain class of jobs that have become 'entry level' and traditional for high-schoolers or part-timers or others who are completely unskilled and most of them are retail or service jobs. Rarely are any of these GOOD jobs with decent pay, benefits, a chance of upward mobility, etc. They're considered 'entry-level' because the expectation is that the second you can find something better, you're out of there. These jobs are all dehumanizing and depressing and no one should be required to work them. The more they can be automated out of existence, the better. The only value these jobs may have is teaching employees that their employers can and would pay them less and work them harder if they were legally allowed to do so. And that they are completely replaceable and therefore effectively worthless from a corporate perspective. Oh, and that the vast majority of customers are shitty, shitty people who enjoy feeling superior to someone else who is forced to put up with them.
"If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?" -- Lily Tomlin