Waste disposal may be restricted entirely via a disposal ban. The most common and widespread such standard is a prohibition on littering. Where a jurisdiction has authorized a specific place or system for trash collection, deposition or abandonment of trash elsewhere may be subject to civil or criminal penalties. Other more specific disposal bans – from mandating that paint not be poured down drains, to specifying national repositories for radioactive waste – all act to govern the final resting place of various wastes. Still other wastes may be required to be separated for recycling, rather than disposal. All of these prohibitions are, in a sense, conditional, in that they do not outright ban the disposal of the material, but rather restrict the disposal location.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Waste management law, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.