Plastic and glass bottle and can recycling is pretty common in most of Europe. You pay a deposit when you buy a can or bottle. And you get it back when you return it. If you leave your empty bottle on the street, some homeless person will return it for you. This is actually a pretty common form of charity in Berlin and it's not considered littering to leave your empty bottle for someone to collect it.

It's not a perfect system but most bottles and cans are collected this way and recycled. That would cover most of the bottles produced by the five companies mentioned in the article. You also don't get a plastic bag for free anymore but you can buy one. In most places it's going to be a paper bag. Simple solutions that work pretty well. And once people adjust, it isn't the end of the world.

The real issue is of course people dumping their trash all over the place instead of putting it in a trash can from where most of it would end up in a landfill, incinerator, or even being recycled. Some places have steep fines for littering, which works. IMHO not a bad thing. If you are too lazy to use a trashcan and get caught, there should be a penalty for being a jerk.

Glass and aluminium are recycled. This works quite well. Plastic (and clothing) on the other hand, is now mostly just collected and afterwards discarded (burned, shipped overseas to dumping grounds, etc.).

Plastic recycling factories are going bankrupt (five in the tiny Netherlands in the space of one year), because they can't compete with new plastic. Textile processors are stuck with warehouses full of unusable discarded fast fashion.

Littering is just a tiny part of this problem. Reducing plastic (by charging for bags) is good and works, but the bigger issue lies with the fact that we use so much plastic, and often have no real choice in the matter.

Unfortunately there is not enough funding for American municipal recycling programs. After China stopped buying American recyclables, most programs shut down nationwide. Then the pandemic, which I do not believe has led to a resurgence.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/18/18271470/us-cities-s...

I completely agree with you that a national beverage tax, refundable, would be a fantastic idea. The problem I see will be in how the program is administered. There will be tension between federal and state over who gets part of the money, who funds the program, maintains it, etc. How to get retailers to put the machines in their store which takes away inventory space? Pay them? Require it?

So many questions. Probably a federal tax that then redistributes the money equally to each state to fund local recycling programs would be easier.