Although it's a sad fact, money is what makes the world go 'round. People (especially Americans) are stingy, and this is why the bottle deposit system works so well. I propose a deposit on more materials than just plastic and aluminum. Think of all the cardboard, plastic wrap, and steel that goes into food packaging. Most of it can be just as easly recycled as beverage bottles and cans, but it is often discarded.
A deposit on recyclable food packages would make consumers think before they waste, and at the very least, would make them pay for creating trash. If a piece of cardboard with a deposit is thrown away, the consumer loses the deposit, the market that sold the cardboard breaks even, and the manufacturer makes the deposit in profit. Hopefully, this would provide incentive enough for companies to start putting deposits on a broader range of packaging.
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The deposit should be based on how difficult/expensive/hazardous the material is to produce. Some of the more complicated plastics like polyvinyl chloride and high density polyethylene require a lot of fossil fuels and produce a lot of pollution. Making these from scratch is very time consuming and dangerous. Recycling such plastics is both good for the environment and good for the consumer, as it keeps costs down. On the other end of the spectrum is cardboard, newspaper, and other wood-pulp products. While I'm not out to convince anyone recycling these is bad, I would argue it doesn't give as heavy a blow to the environment to simply dump these in the trash. Paper products are not only bio-degradable, but are also renewable. Trees grow in 30 years or so, where as it takes petroleum a couple million years to form, and then only under the right conditions. Metals make up the middle of the range, being complicated to produce, but somewhat easy on the environment. Aluminium costs somewhere around $4 per kilo to extract directly from the ground, whereas recycling it costs about 20 cents a kilo. Both processes produce about the same amount of pollution, just the smoke from whatever heat source is used to melt the metal. My proposal is as follows: 5 cents a piece deposit on cardboard, paper, and paper product containers, 10 cents a piece on steel and aluminum containers, and 15 cents for any plastic container.
A neat economic feature about deposits is that they pay people to clean up to residue. So even if the buyer doesn't bother, someone else will. Generally somebody who needs the money more than the buyer/litterer.
First off, most states do not even offer deposits on cans and bottles, let alone cardboard. This would be complicated to execute.
Second, in response to CaptainMagic, aluminum is not terribly expensive to extract from the ground, but requires enormous electrical energy to purify and process. It is vastly cheaper to recycle aluminum, and that is why there are programs to recycle auminum cans.
In many cases, despite the potential for recycling plastics, many have an insufficient market. The expanded polystyrene market is barely able to support recycling efforts.