Easy plastic waste solution is staring us in the face.

[MineralMan]

7. When I was just a lad in the 1950s, soft drink bottles

had a 5 cent deposit on them. Like many other young lads, when my pockets were empty of change to buy junk food and comic books, the solution was close at hand. I'd go around looking for soft drink bottles. A lot of people just threw them away, just like they do with plastic bottles today. So, a trip down the alley behind most streets and peeking into trash cans would result in a dozen or more soft drink bottles. If you found just 10, that was a half-dollar in your pocket. All you had to do was walk or bike to whatever store that sold soft drinks and hand over your loot. The cashier at the store would hand you the money.

Not only did it get the bottles returned by many people, it provided gainful self-employment for children.

It wasn't just the odd half-dollar, either. If I needed more money than that, I just had to look in more trashcans in the alleys. Or, after a weekend, the trash cans in parks were another rich resource to be mined. A nickel at a time.