Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away? If the prices covered the real costs, and they were reasonably known and understandable, people buying stuff could make their own decisions about the best tradeoffs to make between all the various things you mention.<p>Recycling and reusing are great, but there are real costs to both. I&#x27;ve got a bunch of CDs that I don&#x27;t really want anymore. I&#x27;m certainly not ever likely to use them, given Spotify and the like. But I feel bad enough about just throwing them away that I&#x27;ve just held on to them. I fantasize about giving them away to someone but realistically that would be such a pain in the ass that I almost certainly will never bother. [Now I&#x27;m motivated to throw them away!] Just the cost of someone driving to where I live and, maybe, take them from me – for free – has both non-zero environmental and economic costs!<p>Throwing things away is fine. Not accounting for <i>all</i> the costs, to everyone, is the real problem.