Being a stay-at-home mom has many benefits, but intellectual stimulation is not one of them. I spend two to three hours a day cooking and cleaning and an hour or more driving or walking - in other words, a lot of time where my mind is left to solitary wandering.



Sometimes I wish I had some feedback to my wandering thoughts, so I thought I'd occasionally start doing some rambling on the weekends, just to get the thoughts out there to someone besides my husband and maybe provoke some conversation as well.



I would love to hear your comments, but I don't like being told I'm being an idiot, even if I am. So please keep your comments respectful.



This week, I was thinking about JessTrev's suggestion that the government should offer tax incentives for conscientious waste disposal, and also an article I read that said San Francisco was going to start fining people for not recycling.



It reminded me of a debate class I took in college where I debated about waste disposal. My argument was that a program should be implemented in Kentucky (where I was living at the time) allowing people a certain number of trash bags a week, and if they went over that amount, they should be fined. This kind of system would encourage people both to recycle and to use less in general.



But I lost the debate because all of my evidence to support my argument came from case studies and examples in California rather than Kentucky, and according to my professor, if you say the program should be implemented in Kentucky, you have to show evidence that it would work in Kentucky. Personally, I thought that was totally stupid because no one had ever proposed it in Kentucky so of course there were no studies showing how it would work there. But anyway...



Thinking about all of these things, I had the following thoughts:



What if we were responsible for disposing of all of our waste? If something could be recycled, you would be rewarded for disposing of it, or maybe you wouldn't get anything, but if you had to landfill it, you would be fined.

Would that kind of system encourage people to buy more responsible and quality products, since they wouldn't want to pay a fine?

Or would people just end up illegally dumping a lot of things (which was one of the arguments of the other side in my debate class)?

Would knowing that they were responsible for disposal encourage people to buy less in general?

If people were responsible for the dispoal of their own products, how would that influence the marketplace?

Should the responsibility for waste disposal lie with consumers or producers?

If producers were responsible for waste disposal, would they just end up cutting corners, sending things to countries where there are less strict laws?

So these are thoughts I was having this week...Any comments?