[matthewowen]

Companies have choice over how they package their products, and have a number of levers to change behavior: they might reduce the extent to which they provide packaging (does that single piece of fruit need to be wrapped in plastic?), or offer incentives to customers to provide their own packaging (eg cups at coffee shops), or might provide incentives for packaging to be returned instead of trashed (deposits on cans and bottles).

And at the end of all that, if a company still produces products that we know will probably end as packaging litter... hell yeah, charge them (and implicitly the littering consumers) for that negative externality.

[agota]

I don't think that companies should be held responsible for crimes committed using their products.

Why not directly punish the person who committed the crime?

[matthewowen]

Because it's easier to punish the people who enable it.

[agota]

I don't understand why you see companies packaging their products as enabling littering.

If a company produces a product, and then someone uses that product to commit a crime, did the company enable the criminal?

Do you apply this reasoning to any other crimes?