You joke? but go to Japan. They don’t even toss their cigarette butts (the smokers I saw carried a sealable ashtray) and when I asked how everyone could be so clean, they looked at me funny and said “Uh, we live here? Do you throw trash on the ground at home”
So no next-gen needed, just need to live somewhere it's not culturally acceptable to throw trash on the ground.
You can walk around just about any city in my state and see no trash on the ground. Even homeless camps tend to be cleanish. The only place you’ll find trash is the occasional rural road where some asshat has thrown their house garbage in a ditch to spread in the wind. But most people have agreed not to shit on their floor.
Wonder why places like New York City are so different.
Not sure what state you're in, but in every major city I've visited in the Midwest (and in SF, Seattle, San Jose, Denver, etc.) I've always seen some areas in the city where litter is everywhere, often collecting against fences and curbs.
Tourist/more HCOL areas are often very clean, though.
New York has been dirty for hundreds of years, often with organized crime or corruption involved. Read about the 1890s turnaround of the sanitation department for some interesting history.
But, despite that I think it's totally fixible. Either just change the law to force setting aside some ground floor real estate, or put bins where parked cars used to be. I think the latter is more politically feasible.
Nobody likes the filth, but the litter won't stop until the buildings lead the way with the bulk of the problem.
Oh, and I think food delivery caused tons of pointless trash. We need some system to return reusable containers to the restaurants. Very sad their is a restaurant loophole for the new plastic bag ban.
That food delivery thing is an interesting idea. Delivery place switches to reusable sturdy containers. When delivering the delivery guy asks if the people have old containers to return and takes them. They're washed back at the restaurant.
It's a tough sell though. A lot more work for the restaurant and almost certainly higher costs. There will be constant shrinkage of the reusable containers to deal with as well as having to pay someone to wash them.
It would probably work best if the containers were generic and everybody used the same ones, so no matter who you ordered from this time you could return your containers from last time. But that's an even harder sell: why pass up the opportunity for advertising?
I still like the idea, but acknowledge that it would probably struggle to gain traction in the real world.
You just gotta tax the externalizes. Markets don't care unless you make them. The City needs to just make the ban/tax and trust that the private sector can stop moping and figure it out.
So no next-gen needed, just need to live somewhere it's not culturally acceptable to throw trash on the ground.