Joe Fabisevich 
I’m still thinking about how Japan solved the problem of trash on the streets with one simple hack: don’t have trash cans. Now you have to throw stuff out in your own home, which means you don’t do things in public that would generate trash, and everyone has cleaner streets. Truly mind blowing shit.
There are a few good replies to this and the way I wrote this was ambiguous. I didn’t mean to imply they came in and got rid of trash cans so people stopped making a mess, but that counterintuitively the effect of not having a place to dispose of trash is that the streets are cleaner. (I wrote my until post as I walked by an overflowing trash can that was leaving garbage on the streets.)
i am root@mergesort I think that is probably still the wrong conclusion. Try it in America and see what happens.
@null That’s my point. 🙂
Greg Gardner@mergesort I think you might have it backward. It is socially rude there to eat food and drink while you are walking around, so people don't do it, so there is no need for garbage cans and no litter.
You can't just snap your fingers to change cultural norms, though.
Giorgio Romano@mergesort in reality i've read in the past that is "an over-reaction"
They had a lot of trashcans, but after a terrorist attack in the 90s, they removed all them for prevantions
Which i think is a silly thing, event in our times
Kyle Hughes@mergesort wait until you learn why there are no trash cans
Ellen Shapiro@mergesort *requires a cultural taboo against littering. We live next to a diner and when we replaced our fence, the ~decade of trash between the fence and the concrete of the diner’s slightly higher parking lot was absolutely horrendous.
Brian Cordan Young@designatednerd @mergesort it was a pastime of my older brother to go walk around “beer can hill” when we were kids. He built up an impressive collection of vintage cans. It was well in to my adulthood that I stopped to think about why the hell that hill was filled with so many cans! Our culture is definitely not starting from a place where littering was taboo.
Ok. I am a gen-x-er. We have advanced some since then.
(The hill was by a freeway. That leads to more questions about beer cans)
Heath Borders@mergesort first you need a society that cares about preserving society
Michael Sepcot@mergesort 99pi episode on SF’s public trash cans just dropped https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/service-request-03-trash-cans/
Service Request #3: Why Is There So Much Litter in San Francisco? - 99% Invisible
Walking through San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood with an empty cup in hand after grabbing a slice of pizza at Tony’s, 99pi host Roman Mars faced a surprisingly difficult urban challenge: finding a public trash can. This minor frustration opens up an investigation into one of the most fundamental services a municipality provides. The absence