#single-use-plastics

Lightweight single-use items — carrier bags, food wrappers, cups, cutlery, polystyrene — are easily windblown from bins and vehicles into hedgerows, waterways and the sea, where they fragment and persist. Much of it is hard to recycle even when captured.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

California municipalities began banning single-use carryout bags from 2007 onward, with statewide policy following. A 2019 peer-reviewed economic analysis (Taylor, R. L. C., *Journal of Environmental Economics and Manag…

Litterati is a citizen-science app originating in San Francisco in which users photograph litter; AI assists in tagging each item's type, material, and brand into an open database. The brand-level data has been used in…

OpenLitterMap was started by Seán Lynch in Cork, Ireland in 2017 as an open-source, open-data platform modelled on OpenStreetMap. Users photograph and geotag litter via an app, recording type, material, and brand into a…

From October 2023, England banned the supply of plastic plates, bowls, trays, cutlery, balloon sticks, and expanded-polystyrene food and drink containers. This followed an earlier ban on straws, stirrers, and cotton-bud…

The UK introduced a mandatory single-use carrier-bag charge progressively — Wales (2011), Northern Ireland (2013), Scotland (2014) and England (2015). The MCS Beachwatch citizen-science beach survey recorded a steep, su…

Switzerland's litter cleanup costs approximately CHF 200 million per year, historically spread across a patchwork of differing cantonal and municipal fines. A federal initiative led by Parliament and the Federal Office…