It works you see, simply leaving things to market forces does indeed clear up enviornmental problems:

Every week, hundreds of teenage couples visit the
Ponte Milvio and testify to their everlasting love by writing their
names on a padlock and clipping it to a chain wrapped around two of the
bridge’s lampposts. They then throw the keys into the Tiber.

The fad was immortalised last year in I Want You, a romantic novel by Federico Moccia, which has just been turned into a film.

However, the lampposts are now so overburdened that some opposition
members of the local council tabled a motion to remove the padlocks and
clean up the bridge.

So, while the bureaucrats and politicians witter about how to stop the bridge sinking under the weight the market acts:

As the politicians squabbled, however, many chains vanished earlier
this week and some padlocks were found smashed on the ground. Only a
few remained at the top of one of the lampposts, prompting the police
to comment that the person responsible for their removal must have
either been "very short" or "afraid of climbing on the balustrade to
get all the chains".

…

The chains were eventually found at a scrapyard a mile away. Police
said two Romany gypsies had cut them off and carried away the 713kg of
steel in a convoy of shopping trollies. The owner of the scrapyard said
he had paid 13 euros for the metal.

If things have value then people will recycle them anyway, with or without rules to tell them to do so. Of course, if they don’t have value then recycling them is a waste of resources.

Which leads us to a simple test about what we should and should not recycle. If someone will pay you for the waste, recycle it by all means. If you have to pay someone to take it away, then it shouldn’t be recycled at all.