Trash is everywhere, right?

One of the many problems that come with living in a city, small or big, is the trash. The bigger the city, the more littering that takes place. Simply living in a more civilized country does not mean that you get less garbage on the streets, or that people don’t flick away stuff they don’t need anymore.

Without meaning to insult any of the leading tourist attractions in Europe, I humbly propose a  new system to take care of the tons of garbage that populate the streets of any metropolis.

Hire more drudges, have more sweepers on the street. Then measure the amount of trash they bring in. It doesn’t matter if it’s dust or tin foil or plastic bags. If it’s on the street and it shouldn’t be, it’s rubbish.

Then, give out bonuses to said workers based on how much trash they bring in. Naturally, there would be a base salary and a minimum quota. But after that, it’s every broom for itself. This would motivate sweepers to be more thorough in their work. And this is just Phase One.

Phase Two is easy, really. Increase the citizen tax to compensate for the huge bonuses you’re giving the cleaners. It will only take a couple of years until people understand that the more they litter, the more they pay. This will encourage the citizens to be more “environmentally aware.” This will also make them hound others that litter, as they’d feel as though they’re picking up the check. City officials would have to make this tax very obvious, have huge notices on the tax forms, and anywhere else that’s relevant to this issue.

Until the people pick up on this, you can use some of the cash flow to install more trash bins around the city. The thing is that you’d need to pay the public garbage pickup team a bit more, since the weight of the trash collected from the bins would increase over time. All city officials need to do is not make a fuss about that tax. Everything should be fine then.

You’d get the people to do the cleaning for you, before any actual cleaning needs to be done.
Also, for a while, you’d be offering more jobs. Firs with the brooms, and then with the pickup crews. Then there’s also the good PR of having a very clean city.

Win-win-win, anybody?