[cmurf]

People are lazy and selfish. If government doesn't give them a disincentive: fines for littering, high taxes for buying unrecyclable plastics or banning them outright, people flat out do not change their behavior. If everyone on earth consumed and trashed as much as the average American, the whole planet would be a toxic waste dump. And we've seen that in the early part of the industrial revolution in the U.S., toxic rivers and streams, that took decades and billions of mostly public funds to clean up those superfund sites.

[MandieD]

Most Germans don't bring back racks of glass beer bottles and bags full of plastic water bottles because they care about the environment so much - they do it because there's a 0.08-0.15 EUR deposit on reusable glass, 1.50 EUR on the plastic racks and 0.25 EUR on one-time use plastic drink bottles, and big stores that sell bottle drinks have developed automats for accepting the empties and tallying up the refunds because they have to accept all standard bottles, even if they don't sell that particular item.

Any other recycling that happens is mostly because trash bins are only emptied every two weeks, and more than a 60L bin for a household is punitively expensive. Even if you don't care about the 3.10 EUR you'd get back for the rack of beer, you do care about having to pay to get rid of something that large.