Keep America Beautiful: The Litter Tax

Americans of a certain generation may remember the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign in which the message to stop littering ended with an Indian crying.

It was a scam, according to a friend of mine who handled public relations for the program. That was because the campaign was funded by the companies that made the things that residents of the United States discard and it was designed to make them feel guilty instead of controlling the output of these companies.

Years later, litter is far worse, largely thanks to the pervasive consumption of water in plastic bottles. The roads of America have become an unending avenue of trash, plastic water bottles, fast food containers and wrappings, beer bottles, and aluminum cans.

Why do people litter? The Keep America Beautiful campaign suggested it was because people are bad. But I think there’s a simpler reason—litter stems from the production of material that is meant to be disposable.

I called it the “Packaging Tax”. Business has displaced the cost of disposing of the packaging. Either we pay the price despoiling the outdoors or governmental bodies assume the price of cleaning up and disposing of this material. The other option is to provide incentives for eliminating litter, or getting people to pick it up. That was done for years with deposits on soft drink bottles and with the value of aluminum cans that could be recycled.

This is not unlike the source of toxic dumps in which waste was disposed of in available vacant lots, before the impact of these wastes was discovered, and probably continuing the theory of the frontier, that there were no limits to America.

There is no evidence that continuing to tell people they are naughty because they throw away material that becomes roadside debris. It is more likely that making fewer things to throw away will.

And whether it's deposits on bottles and cans, or some kind of tax brief to encourage businesses to help solve this problem, the only place the solution can originate is the manufacturing line.