Defining disincentives could be different, depending on the vantage point. With the introduction of producer responsibility, one of its objectives was in fact to disincentivize or incent, depending on which side of the coin you're looking at, producers and manufacturers to look at better designed goods, be it swapping out materials for a better choice or maybe refill or reuse. Then sort of, lastly, it was about really understanding the costs of the system. Before there was producer responsibility, industry had no idea how much municipalities and taxpayers were actually spending on blue boxes.
There are opportunities for us to look at costing pollution. A great example of that is charging for plastic bags at the point of sale. I was involved many moons ago, when the provincial Government of Ontario was contemplating banning plastic bags. There was, obviously, a reaction by the retail sector, as we would expect, and the plastic manufacturers of plastic bags. In lieu of banning them from sale, they worked with the province, and us as a convenor in that discussion, to look at other mechanisms.
What they committed to was actually reducing the supply of plastic bags to consumers by half at a certain time frame. They exceeded that time frame, and they exceeded that amount. Many of them actually priced a plastic bag and offered a reusable one, which we now know is really quite successful. In fact, it carved the runway for the federal government, the Government of Canada, to come in and effectively ban them as a single-use item.
Disincentives and pricing pollution can be a very effective tool to incent the kind of behaviour you want and not to incent the behaviour you don't, and that's at every level.