25M dollars? Buy a truck and something to load it. Pay one guy to spend the next few years moving it to a landfill as a full time job instead of contracting out the big cleanup.
Where's the truck gonna dump it? The reason this stuff was dumped here in the first place is because waste disposal is so absurdly regulated or administered that it was "cheap enough to be worth the risk" to do it this way than the right way.
This isn't a problem that municipalities with "better in the landfill than the river" policies have. This is the kind of problem you get when a bunch of the let them eat cake crowd run amuck. It's literally the "why is our city covered in trash". "I don't know Karen, maybe because you voted to have everyone pay per bag so nobody picks up litter the blows into their yard because it literally costs them" problem but in truck sized increments.
> This isn't a problem that municipalities with "better in the landfill than the river" policies have. This is the kind of problem you get when a bunch of the let them eat cake crowd run amuck. It's literally the "why is our city covered in trash". "I don't know Karen, maybe because you voted to have everyone pay per bag so nobody picks up litter the blows into their yard because it literally costs them" problem but in truck sized increments.
Yes, dumping trash costs money, as it should, how else do you wish to account for the externality of creating trash? Either through taxes or paying per disposal.
It seems to work pretty well here in Sweden (it's free at the point of collection, paid by taxes), it's a bit annoying to go to the proper recycling center for anything that isn't normal household trash but people still do it, it's not perfect but bigger recycling stations accepting tyres, furniture, electronics, etc. are properly used to dispose of anything that isn't paper/plastics/metal/glass from day-to-day usage, for those there are always a nearby recycling station to dispose at.
Also looks like it works well in the Netherlands, in Denmark, and other countries with similar wealth to the UK. Perhaps it's culture the problem, not policy, fix the culture.
It's very easy to screech about overregulation as the cause of anything, like a boogeyman you can use for all sorts of issues, this issue in particular is quite properly solved in similar countries so stop with the screech, please. If the regulations in place do not work, change it, do away with paying for collection and use taxes for it so people don't feel the pain when they need to throw the trash out, it's already "paid".
The biggest environmental scandal in Sweden in the past years was the Think Pink[0] case where a company ("Think Pink") lied about properly disposing of the trash they were responsible for, founder and directors of the company are in jail for that.
What about prison labor? I'm no fan of the ball and chain, but I think inmates picking up trash is a perfectly reasonable and effective form of societal benefit.
