Solutions

Cut overlap by changing when and where people swim: avoid dawn, dusk and night; stay out after heavy rain and away from river mouths and murky water; keep clear of baitfish, seals and fishing; swim at patrolled beaches. Cheap and universal, but only as good as compliance.

A municipality buys laying hens from regional breeders and gives them free or subsidised to registered households with gardens. The hens eat kitchen scraps, diverting biowaste at source, and give eggs in return. Run as a complement to curbside collection, not a replacement.

Combine more and better-placed ashtrays, free pocket ashtrays, public awareness that filters are plastic, and modest enforcement — sustained as a coordinated program rather than a one-off, typically halving butt litter where measured.

Repurpose vacant inner-city buildings into permanent, free-entry hygiene centres with showers, toilets, shaving supplies and sanitary products. Personal-care brands cover running costs via in-kind product and naming rights, with no conditional access and an NGO running the site.

A fixed, on-the-spot financial penalty raises the expected cost of littering. Consistency and visible enforcement matter more than fine size — a high penalty that is never issued deters nobody. Works as a backstop alongside infrastructure and behaviour-change measures, not as a s

An open platform structuring civic problem-solving as a shared graph: issues split into sub-issues, each issue gathers competing solutions, and every solution collects case studies with real outcomes, costs and metrics. Semantic search and voting keep it navigable and honest.

Redesign bins to capture more litter: make disposal a small game or 'vote', place and size them where litter actually occurs, and use fill-sensors so they don't overflow. Turning the right choice into the fun, convenient choice measurably cuts nearby litter.

Upgrade trusted existing community buildings with solar and battery storage so they stay powered during outages and serve as dependable heating/cooling refuges. Gives at-risk residents a known fallback that doesn't depend on being checked on.

A shipping-container RO plant powered by solar PV and battery storage, producing ~75,000 L/day for ~25,000–35,000 people, operated by trained local staff and partly funded through water sales. Capital cost ~US$0.5–0.57M; ~20-year service life.

Install rain gardens, permeable surfaces and other sustainable drainage (SuDS) across the catchment to soak up rainfall where it lands, cutting peak runoff to overwhelmed drains. Most effective as a dispersed, upstream-weighted network.

Form a standing community Flood Action Group — backed by a flood charity — to systematically log flood hotspots, sustain engagement between events, and act as one coordinated voice to the councils and water companies that otherwise diffuse responsibility.

Porous fired-terracotta modules, kept wet by solar-powered pumps and fans, cool passing air by evaporation — creating comfort pockets at bus stops, plazas and courtyards with no refrigerants and minimal energy. Effect is large in hot, dry air but collapses in humidity, and every

Use varespladib (PLA2 inhibitor), marimastat (SVMP inhibitor), and DMPS/dimercaprol (Zn2+ chelators) as cheap, heat-stable, species-agnostic first-line treatment that buys time before or alongside antivenom, particularly in the pre-hospital window.

Install half-height automatic platform gates (1.2–1.5 m) where full-height screen doors are too costly or structurally infeasible, reducing platform suicides substantially—though less than full-height, since the barriers can be climbed.

Systematically identify recurring trackside black-spots and install fencing, mid-track barriers, and access restrictions at those locations — accepting a documented risk of displacement to nearby unfenced sites.

Install blue LED lighting on platforms as a low-cost, easily retrofitted calming/deterrent measure aimed at reducing suicides — an approach with large but heavily contested effect estimates that should not be treated as equivalent to physical barriers.

A black-lined basin of saltwater under a sloped glass cover: sun evaporates the water, it condenses on the glass and runs off as distillate. No moving parts, no consumables, repairable with local materials — but output is ~4–6 L/m²/day, so area demand is the binding constraint.

Sell shampoo/soap as a concentrated liquid (or tablet/powder) that the customer dilutes with tap water at home. Removes most of the shipping weight and volume while keeping the product a liquid the customer already knows — preserving brand control over the final formula.

Plant and steward trees, prioritizing the specific streets that heat-mapping shows are hottest and have least canopy. Trees cut surface and air temperature through shade and evapotranspiration, and also reduce stormwater runoff.

Construct recessed 'suicide pits' in the trackbed below platform level, giving a person on the track survivable space beneath a passing train. Reduces fatality of attempts without deterring them — a lethality-mitigation complement to other prevention measures.

Use CCTV analytics/AI to detect at-risk behaviour (loitering at platform ends, letting trains pass, trackside intrusion) and alert staff in real time — technically promising but without empirical evidence of reducing suicides in practice.

Reintroduce passive cooling from traditional hot-climate design — shaded streets, courtyards, underground air channels — and pair it with heat governance: naming and categorizing heatwaves so the public treats heat as seriously as storms.

Work with news media to adopt and enforce responsible suicide-reporting guidelines — no method/location detail, no sensational or repetitive coverage, sign-posting help — to suppress imitative clusters, the best-evidenced non-physical rail-suicide intervention.

Systematically test which existing polyvalent antivenoms already neutralize orphan-species venoms via antivenomics and preclinical assays, then pursue label extensions — expanding effective coverage without developing new products.

Replace dark, heat-absorbing roofs and pavement with high-albedo reflective surfaces — cool roofs, light-colored or coated pavement — to reflect sunlight rather than retain it. Acts fast and scales through building codes and repaving cycles.

Stabilise antivenom supply with guaranteed-volume pooled procurement, donor/government subsidy, WHO prequalification, and regional manufacturing — so effective, region-matched antivenom stays commercially viable and reaches clinics affordably.

Produce and distribute lyophilised (freeze-dried) antivenom with a multi-year ambient shelf life so it can be stocked at rural health posts and remote clinics where refrigeration is unreliable or absent.

Where coastal advection fog is dependable, vertical mesh nets passively strain water droplets from wind-driven fog into reservoirs — no energy, no membranes, no seawater intake. Cheap and low-tech, but geographically constrained and historically prone to social/ownership collapse

Replace volunteer committees with a professional maintenance company on a performance contract: hotline, guaranteed repair times (~3 days), preventive maintenance, and a stocked parts supply chain — funded by pooled mobile-money subscriptions and results-based payments tied to up

Combine community health education (discouraging traditional-healer delay, teaching safe first aid) with organised volunteer rapid transport — e.g., motorcycle networks — to get envenomed patients to an antivenom-equipped centre within the window that determines survival.

A femtosecond-laser-textured aluminium panel wicks seawater uphill across its face, absorbs ~92% of sunlight to evaporate it, and uses the coffee-ring effect plus salt creeping to push crystallised salt to the panel edges — self-cleaning, no membranes, no chemicals, no electricit

Reframe not-littering as an expression of who people already are — local pride, group identity — rather than an environmental instruction. Aimed at the demographics most likely to litter and delivered through broadcast and social media at scale.

Split voting from economic rights: put voting stock in an irrevocable purpose trust whose deed binds the company to its mission, and give non-voting economic stock to a mission nonprofit so profits fund the cause. The company stays for-profit but can never be sold away from its p

Get certified against a published social/environmental standard (e.g. B Corp) as a public, audited signal of commitment. Cheap, requires no ownership change, useful as a complement — but it locks nothing: it's voluntary, revocable, and the first thing dropped when it conflicts wi

A central plant chills water and pipes it underground to many buildings, replacing individual AC units. It rejects waste heat away from street level, cutting energy use per unit of cooling and the anthropogenic heat that feeds the urban heat island.

Teach and normalise an outdoor ethic in which visitors carry out everything they bring in — including micro-litter and food scraps — sustained through education, signage and partnerships with land agencies and outdoor organisations.

Encase low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste in resin, bitumen, or cement, drum it, and sink it on the deep abyssal plain — relying on the ocean's vast volume and assumed stability to dilute any eventual release below harmful levels.

Trained pilots fly drones over patrolled beaches, spotting sharks from above in real time so lifeguards can warn or clear the water. Non-lethal, near-zero marine impact, and the same flights also catch rip currents and missing swimmers. Limited to good weather and clear water.

A fence from seabed to surface and shore to shore fully encloses a swim area, keeping sharks out without trapping or killing wildlife. Inside the enclosure protection is near-absolute, but it suits sheltered beaches only and protects just that zone, not the open surf.

Sell a tiny veto share (~1%) to an independent purpose foundation that holds no economic stake but permanently blocks two actions: selling the company for owners' personal gain, and extracting profits as dividends or capital gains. Founders keep full operational control; the lock

Embed the cause inside a product people already use daily (a search engine, a current account, a consumer good) and route its profits to the mission. Impact then grows with ordinary adoption and ad/transaction revenue, not with donor cycles or grant rounds.

Run a consumer service (e.g. ad-funded web search) at a profit, ring-fence the surplus for vetted reforestation partners, and lock the pledge into a mission-protected ownership structure so it can't be quietly cut during downturns or ownership changes.

Shape the cues that drive littering: keep spaces visibly clean (a clean place signals 'nobody litters here'), and pair 'most people don't litter' (descriptive) with 'littering is not OK' (injunctive) messages, which together change behaviour more than either alone.

When a sale can't be stopped, negotiate an independent 'social mission' board into the acquisition agreement—with defined authority over values, advocacy, and brand integrity held separately from the parent's commercial control. Only as strong as courts will enforce it, but bette

Fund local partners to restore native species on degraded land — not carbon-rich habitat that doesn't need trees — with multi-year aftercare and satellite-plus-field monitoring. Report trees alive over time, not seedlings planted.

Require retailers to charge a small mandatory fee per single-use carrier bag at checkout. Even a small charge cuts bag use and bag litter by around 80%, nudging shoppers toward reusables — a low-cost policy with fast, measurable results.

Where land was recently forested, protect and prune regrowth from surviving roots and seed banks (assisted/farmer-managed natural regeneration) rather than transplanting nursery seedlings — far cheaper, with site-adapted species. Intact standing forest should take priority, as it

Organise volunteers to remove litter at scale — through recurring community cleanups, fitness-linked litter-picking (plogging), and 'adopt a stretch' stewardship. Removes existing harm, builds an engaged constituency, and can feed monitoring data.

Manufacture antivenom as a defined cocktail of recombinant human monoclonal antibodies targeting conserved toxin families (3FTx, PLA2, SVMP, SVSP), replacing dozens of narrow regional polyclonal sera with a small number of broad-spectrum products split roughly by neurotoxic-elapi

Add a small refundable deposit to drink containers, repaid on return. The financial incentive drives return rates above 90% and is the best-evidenced single intervention for container litter, cutting it roughly 40–80% across many jurisdictions.

Prohibit specific high-frequency, low-value single-use plastics — straws, stirrers, cutlery, plates, expanded-polystyrene food containers, balloon sticks — removing the item from the market entirely so it cannot become litter.

Make the companies that put packaging on the market pay for its end-of-life and cleanup, and reward less-wasteful designs. Shifts cost and design incentives upstream to the producers who created the litter, rather than onto taxpayers.

Use camera surveys (handheld, vehicle- or drone-mounted) with machine-vision models to automatically detect, count and classify litter over large areas — producing objective, repeatable density data to target action and rigorously measure whether interventions worked.

Replace or overlay road/path surfaces with load-bearing PV panels that vehicles travel over. Every real-world pilot has under-delivered or failed: flat orientation, traffic wear, and 8–360× higher cost versus equivalent off-road panels make it a cautionary approach rather than a

In heavily used or fragile areas, require visitors to pack out all waste — including human waste — and provide the means (issued pack-out kits, locking trailhead bins), turning the Leave No Trace ethic into an enforced condition of access.

Run recurring beach and waterway cleanups where volunteers log every item by type on a standardized card or app, building a comparable marine-debris database that identifies hotspots and supplies evidence for upstream policy (bans, deposits, producer responsibility).

Lay PV in the gap between rails (removable panels, e.g. Sun-Ways) or integrate cells into replacement sleepers (e.g. Greenrail), reusing sealed rail corridors without new land. More promising than road-surface PV because trains pass intermittently rather than braking and grinding

Turn survey-derived dump-site boundaries and drum positions into an authoritative georeferenced layer that is mandatory input to seabed licensing, nautical charts, and marine spatial plans — so mining, trawling, and cable projects are routed around the zones by default.

Let anyone photograph and geotag litter via an app that records type, material, and brand into an open database. Crowdsourcing builds real-time, street-level maps revealing hotspots and brand-level evidence for producer accountability.

Mount conventionally tilted, air-cooled panels on land a corridor already occupies — highway embankments, medians, canopies over lanes, tunnel roofs, noise barriers, and canal covers — reusing committed right-of-way while preserving the properties that make PV cheap and productiv

Collect paired water, sediment, and biota samples at graded distances from breached drums, measuring dump-specific radionuclides (cobalt-60, niobium-94, caesium-137, americium-241) to separate dump-derived signal from fallout background — with fixed reference targets enabling rep

Use an AUV to fly lawnmower tracks over the dump zone and build georeferenced photo-mosaics locating individual drums, then send a crewed submersible or ROV for close visual assessment, radiometry, and sampling of selected targets. Two tiers make partial coverage of a 14,500 km²

A central facility fills standardised containers to order, labelled per household; a carrier delivers full units and collects empties on the same stop for cleaning and refill. Filling only on order closes the contamination window and the swap removes dispensing friction.

Launch refill in hotels and multi-unit buildings before going direct-to-consumer. These give free route density (many units per address), a rational B2B buyer not fragile consumer goodwill, contract-based predictable demand, and a cheap place to prove the cleaning economics.

A direct-to-consumer refill service combining concentrate (no water shipped), fill-to-order labelling, ad-hoc orders batched against a cutoff so routes can collect empties, and a closed loop. Made durable by skipping the 30 to 50 percent retail margin and by customer retention.

A treaty regime that first moratoriumed (1983) then permanently banned (from 1993) the dumping of radioactive waste at sea, shifting from case-by-case permits to blanket prohibition. It is the approach that actually stopped new drums entering the ocean.

Install a shared coop serving many households or an institution (school, retirement home) instead of giving hens to individual homes. Residents bring food scraps, a rota or staff care for the hens, and eggs are shared. Reaches gardenless households and spreads the care burden.

The municipality does not distribute hens. It subsidises coops with a rebate and runs free chicken-keeping classes so residents keep their own backyard hens that eat food scraps. This avoids the authority's animal-welfare liability and fits where keeping hens is already legal.

Train station and on-train staff to recognise, approach and engage people showing signs of suicidal crisis (e.g. Samaritans'

Recover dumped drums from the deep seabed using ROVs, lifting rigs, and sealed containment vessels, then transfer them to managed onshore storage — removing the waste from the marine environment rather than leaving it to decay in place.

Pair two-tier satellite monitoring (an annual census plus near-real-time alerts, ideally radar where cloud is heavy, published openly) with a funded, empowered enforcement body that acts on alerts through inspections, fines, embargoes, and seizure of clearing equipment.

Attack the economics, not just the act: zero-deforestation buyer agreements (Soy Moratorium, G4 cattle deal), rural credit conditioned on compliance, a property registry (CAR), and blacklisting the worst-offending municipalities so cleared land loses market and credit access.

Bind the measures with a standing interministerial action plan (PPCDAm) covering land-use planning, monitoring and sustainable production, funded by a performance-based mechanism (the Amazon Fund) that pays out only after verified reductions and draws sustained donor finance.

Terracycle offers free cigarette recycling programs (though only part of the cigarette is recycled or composted).

Install crisis-line signage, supportive messaging, and direct-connection help-points at platforms, bridges, and known hotspots, delivered by operators in partnership with crisis services. A low-cost baseline layer; standalone effect on rail suicide is modest and under-evidenced.

Where track runs close to psychiatric institutions, add targeted fencing, barriers, or routing/siting changes to break the physical proximity that makes those sections hotspots for patient suicides — a driver generic network-wide measures leave unaddressed.

Establish protocols linking mental-health services and rail operators — sharing elevated-risk periods (e.g. around discharge), agreeing alerting and safety-planning for patients near rail — so clinical risk information translates into targeted operational vigilance.

Align suicide-classification practice between railway-operator (ERA) records and national mortality statistics — resolving the 'undetermined intent' gap through shared coding rules and record linkage — so the true rail-suicide count is visible for prevention and evaluation.

Install full-height platform screen doors (PSDs) — floor-to-ceiling barriers with sliding doors aligned to train doors — to physically seal the platform edge and eliminate track access at stations. This intervention has the strongest evidence of any rail-suicide measure.

Have municipalities procure textile collection as a paid service (service contract or per-tonne gate fee), like glass or biowaste, so the operator is paid to collect and divert tonnage and resale revenue just lowers the price — moving commodity risk from the fragile operator to t

Set the EPR support per tonne to the measured end-to-end cost of collecting, sorting, and disposing of textiles, indexed to rise automatically when resale revenue falls — so collection is a cost-recovered public service funded by producers, not a bet on the export price.

Use deep-learning protein design (RFdiffusion) to computationally create small, ultra-stable proteins that bind and neutralize conserved venom toxins, manufacturable cheaply by microbial fermentation without animal immunization — as low-cost broad-spectrum antivenom components o…

Scale the EPR fee by recyclability (bonus for durable mono-fibre garments, malus for disposable blends) and add a per-item levy on ultra-fast-fashion volume. This funds reject processing and pushes producers to design for sortability — shrinking the unsellable fraction at source.

Phone apps push real-time shark alerts — automatically when a tagged shark passes an acoustic listening station, plus crowd-sourced or spotter-confirmed sightings. Cheap to distribute and good for awareness, but only tagged or seen sharks appear, risking false reassurance.

Bottom-set gillnets off bathing beaches entangle and kill large sharks to thin local numbers. Long-established, but they are a culling device, not a barrier: sharks pass around them, bycatch of turtles, dolphins and rays is high, and bite-reduction evidence is weak.