Scots back a “polluter pays” tax on plastic packaging firms to pay to clean up litter.
A new poll for green charity Keep Scotland Beautiful (KSB) found more than seven in 10 people support industry levies.
Right now councils are spending £1m a week sweeping the streets and picking litter - much of which is single-use plastic.
At least one piece of such packaging was found in more than two in five of more than 4000 sites surveyed by KSB across Scotland.
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The UK is looking to introduce a scheme called Extended Producer Responsibility to make firms pay for household rubbish collections and recycling for their packaging.
KSB and others hope the Scottish Government will go further and extend this to litter too.
The charity’s Paul Wallace: “The principal that packaging producers should bear some of the financial responsibility for managing their packaging which becomes litter is supported by 71% of people asked in Scotland.
"We can't just expect councils to continue to pick up all the litter that is dropped.”
The Food and Drink Federation - which represents the firms selling much of the packaging - is happy to pay for EPR for recycling and collections. But it opposes a litter levy - saying the rubbish on the street is the fault of litterbugs, not producers.
Environmentalists hope consensus can be found - and Scotland can avoid a repetition of the Deposit Return Scheme saga and another showdown between commercial and green lobbies.
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