If we talk about coffee cups, and you create a regulation that says that coffee cups need to be collected and recycled at a rate of 85% or 90%, then the fast food outlet has a choice to make to meet that target. The coffee cup needs to be redesigned to make it recyclable to meet that recycling target. The system to collect the coffee cups needs to be established. Then at that point, they may look at the cost of that and say, “Well, maybe we need to move to an entirely different way to deliver coffee. Maybe we need to have some kind of reward system for a reusable coffee cup”.
By internalizing these costs today of being able to throw stuff away, you're now changing decisions that might be made. Therefore, I keep coming back to putting the obligation on the producer to collect and recycle their material at a high target. New opportunities will arise as they look at the cost of doing that and decide how they can either optimize what you've asked them to do or do something completely different that avoids the problem in the first place.