Evaluation of Solutions

This section will discuss and evaluate two possible solutions to the problem of garbage
disposal in Lima, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of each as well as presenting the
authors’ opinion.

One possible solution is to reduce the amount of waste in Lima is to punish the companies and
individuals responsible with heavy fines if people or companies produce too much. The benefits
of this would be that it would deter people from illegally dumping waste because the costs of
the punishment would outweigh the benefits, and so people would be encouraged to produce
less garbage. However, a disadvantage of this is that it is very difficult to catch the people
responsible and it requires extras resources for the police to enforce. Another problem with
this solution is that it won’t necessarily stop people producing too much garbage because the
risk of getting caught is less of a cost than the cost of reducing the amount of garbage
produced.

An alternative solution is to give incentives for companies and individuals to recycle. These
incentives could include giving a tax break to companies that can prove that they recycle, or
encouraging individuals to recycle by charging a small deposit on recyclable things when they
buy them that can be recovered when they recycle after using them. An advantage of this
would be that it would be easier to administrate because the government isn’t required to do
much as the actions are carried out by companies and individuals rather than being policed by
the government. A disadvantage though is that this might create an extra cost for companies
and it could affect the economy negatively.

In our opinion, the best solution would be to give incentives to encourage people to recycle.
This is because people are more likely to change their behaviour with positive incentives than
with punishments. Also, this would cost much for the government to do in comparison to the
extra resources needed to enforce punishments for those producing too much waste.