perverse incentives

Call me Doctor: I spent 4 years of my younger life on the Pequod in Boston slogging through a PhD. But it was quite left-field because the field-work involved coursing across The Canadian Maritimes and New England looking at cats . . . I dunno? maybe rather than squinting at test-tubes while wearing a white lab-coat?? My supervisor wasn't even a 'proper professor' with tenure. Thru the ministrations and advocacy of Lynn Margulis, my boss was an unsalaried adjunct professor working from home decades before that became the new normal. Apart from me (and 10,000 documented cats), Neil was inching forward research projects in genealogy and numismatics. This required hammering out letters in his office and once a day crossing town to the post-office to send them and collect incommmming for his attention.

About halfway though my time there, Massachusetts implemented a 5c levy on beverage containers which could be redeemed on their return. The scheme was designed to  reduce littering - recycling hadn't yet been invented?! On his way to Post Office, Neil would rootle through the trash bins and fetch out redeemable tins left there by school children who disdained to pick up a nickel from the sidewalk, let alone go out of their way to turn in a can of Sprite. On his way back from the PO, Neil would redeem his loot at the Star Market before going home for lunch. With his scruffy beard and thrift-store top-coat, he was possibly pitied as a homeless bum rather than the owner-occupier of a million dollar mid-Victorian home in one of the wealthiest 'burbs of Boston.

It's an image which surged over my attention-horizon recently because of an RTE piece about trash in Dublin city centre: "He also said that since the introduction of the RETURN scheme, members of the public opening bags looking for plastic bottles had become a significant issue for those trying to keep the city clean". Dau.II has been living & working in Dublin city centre through calendar 2024. Shocked! she be Shocked! at the drifts of rubbish strewing down the streets of her walking commute across town each morning. Rate-paying businesses seem to leave plastic bags of trash out on the street at close of business in the evening but refuse collectors pick it up the following morning. That is beyond belief in a working First World economy but seagulls do relish a chip.
But lookit: by privileging one sort of rubbish with a cash-value the result is to spread other (more noxious?) filth down the street from ripped trash-bags.

A beverage deposit return scheme was launched In Ireland on 1st Feb 2024 but only half the members of my nuclear family have actually loaded bottles or cans into a  scruncher machine and received a docket in return. My first time, I naively tried it without my glasses and couldn't read any of the messages (press for receipt, for e.g.) a more experienced ould buffer at the next machine kindly helped me out.

Also: it's perverse to charge people to have their trash taken away. Especially by competing capitalist companies exploiting low-hanging fruit and gouging their employees on wages. It just encourages the poor to dump elsewhere. Bring back domestic rates and unionized bin-collectors.