REMAKE/RECYCLE: HOW TO VANQUISH THE AQUAPOD?

    Having just noticed a guy blithely dropping some paper napkins into a sidewalk recycling container clearly marked "Bottles and Cans," I'm struck once again by how clueless most people seem to be about recycling and what goes into the products they buy.  Even the people in my building, who tend to be affluent and well educated, still put milk cartons in the paper-recycling bin, or plastic bags in the bottle-and-can bin.
      These simple distinctions apparently elude most people, even relatively enlightened, progressive people.  It seems that most folks are just too ignorant, lazy or, to be generous, busy to try to understand the nature of what they consume, and they simply choose to ignore its consequences.
    So what to do?  On the back end, it looks like we'll have to develop sorting technology so people won't have to make the apparently unfathomable distinction between, for instance, corrugated cardboard and office paper.  They'll just throw everything into the same bin and some machine will decide where to send it — i.e., toss 'em all and let God sort 'em out.
    But what about on the front end?  It's not possible to decrease the supply of wasteful products like Poland Spring's egregious Aquapod bottles, so how to decrease the demand for such things?  People find them convenient and resolutely resist pondering the effects of buying them.  No matter how bad the environment gets, I guarantee that people will continue in their ways, because their actions seem so far abstracted from their consequences.  Then there's the selfish SUV-style attitude that they're going to waste all they want, let other people conserve; or that there are so many people out there that one person's actions won't make a difference anyway.  And besides, in America, if you can't buy what you want then the terrorists have won.
    I firmly believe that you can't legislate morality, so — assuming there will be no sea-change in American attitudes toward consumption even in the midst of economic disaster — how can we get people to change their ways?  To borrow a line from the acting world, what's their motivation?