Comment by OutOfHere
4 hours ago
I don't understand why the local governments do such a poor job at cleaning litter. Do they not understand how bad it is? In NYC, the Bronx is utterly filthy.
4 hours ago
I don't understand why the local governments do such a poor job at cleaning litter. Do they not understand how bad it is? In NYC, the Bronx is utterly filthy.
It'd be an interesting jobs program. Cleaning up neighborhoods can have a lot of beneficial effects like reducing the amount of new litter. It could even reduce crime. It's also a job that would get people outside and keep them moving which is probably better for their health than being chained to desk all day, and it can't be done (even poorly) by a chatbot
NYC's approach (or lack of an approach, depending on how you look at it) has been to unevenly distribute trashcans. This student made an interesting visualization of the distribution[1].
Unsurprisingly, trash can placement correlates with neighborhood wealth. Poorer neighborhoods get fewer city-managed trashcans, so more trash ends up on the street.
[1]: https://studentwork.prattsi.org/infovis/visualization/waste-...
It's a cost center that people don't want to fund.
And in some places like NYC you'd have to rival the police budget to make a dent in it.
Would you though? As somebody else pointed out it could be a good public works/job creation program. You could probably put 4-5 people to work cleaning up a year for less than 1 cop. I’m kind of making up numbers here but I feel like that can’t be too far off what with salary, pension, equipment, etc.
A few hundred people dedicated to taking care of litter would likely make a difference anywhere. You can get that for far less than $6 billion. You could pay 1000 people $1000/day to do it and you’d be at $365mill.
This works best when you pair it with promoting personal responsibility, otherwise you have to be careful it doesn't lead to the mindset of "I can throw this on the ground because it's somebody else's job to pick it up."