This was inspired by a post I saw the other day.
In my city, there’s a fast food restaurant where people regularly use the drive through, park in a nearby neighborhood to eat, and when they’re done just toss their trash out the window.
What’s to be done about this in an ideal world? My initial thought is that “police” should stake it out and hand out littering tickets to those doing this.
Of course, these police would be unarmed, properly trained in deescalation, and maybe not even part of a greater police department (supposing such department even exists).
But I’m worried that this is just a super lib response, and wondering what your thoughts are. I’m a bit troubled by handing out these fines - these are potentially hundreds of dollars to people who can’t afford it. And an alternative sentence of community service to clean up trash, while there seems to be a sense of proportionate justice to it, is of course forced labor and would be unconstitutional under the 13th amendment but for that exception that people on this website love to quote and dunk on. Moreover, this is a deterrence-based approach which opens its own can of worms.
Littering is a consequence of a production problem that puts the responsibility for packaging and waste entirely on "consumers" that now have a chore to do - or often fail to do. You can make that chore easier (enough bins), you can enforce the chore (cops, some kind of social engineering), or deal with the production problem to eliminate the chore.
The latter is far superior to any of the others but is precluded by capitalist interests: making waste your problem and not theirs improves short-term profits, i.e. it's an "externality", and they've run and continue to support a society-wide PR campaign premised on nagging consumers to "do their part" and it is now part of a wider social norm that only understands such problems in terms of consumer responsibility.
As an alternative, imagine if the packaging was already fully biodegradable. Or was part of a truly circular path with glass recycling you were paid to do. Or better yet, adopting a practice of reusable containers that are properly washed and distributed and easy to return anywhere (or were just part of getting food). Or even just not having containers or restaurants that require any kind of to-go container or a car to get to, if we're really reimagining.