I have been watching magnet fishing and people love to toss stuff over bridges without a second thought on the environmental impact. Hiding evidence I can almost understand but not lawnmowers, car batteries, etc.
It seems deeper fines should be made to discourage this terrible behavior.
Lack of proper disposal facilities and/or fees for using said facilities. Easier to dump something in a lake or in the bushes than driving 40 minutes across town to a special facility and paying $30+ to dispose of it properly.
Everyone who disposes properly has to pay a fee. The only ones who have to pay the fine for dumping are those that get caught.
Solution: turn responsible disposal into a game, where if you can successfully sneak your trash to the correct section of the disposal center without anyone noticing, you get paid the amount you would have had to pay as a fee.
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It’s not free for companies and private citizens always (afaik) have pay for garbage collection which includes access to recycling places (landfills are illegal)
Canada used to do this, but then they switched to charging the disposal “eco” fee up front when you buy the product new. Everything from that point on has been free to dispose of. Any metal or electronics products are all saleable scrap though, so you can get paid for them if you take them to a metal recycler instead of the dump. A lot of places advertise free places to dump those products so they can take them in to sell. Some will even come pick them up for free as well. But if something doesn’t have an eco fee or isn’t otherwise valuable scrap or recyleable, you pay by weight to landfill it.
Depending on what it is the cost is a lot more than $30 which is a big reason these things get dumped. An old fridge with toxic coolant could be closer to $1k.
Fun fact, those refrigerents can be (and are required to be) reclaimed and sold to recyclers. Old refrigerants that can no longer be legaly produced are actually worth an absurd amount of money when reclaimed because they can still be used but because they can’t legally be manufactured or imported the only source for them is stuff reclaimed out of other systems. Companies will pay absurd amounts of money to not have to refit their refrigeration systems to work with new refrigerants.
So if you have an old appliance still full of something like R-12 or R-22 then you have a gold mine to someone with the right equipment and certifications.