Bottle deposits making a comeback?

It works like a charm in San Diego.

You'll never see a single can on the beaches there, b/c people go around & collect them... sometimes as soon as you put the can down next to you.


I also think we should start charging per pound for trash. That's the only way you'll get a lot of people to minimize, recycle, re-use,
compost, etc..

 

Charging for Trash will cause the littering problem to skyrocket. It is the exact economic opposite of paying for container recovery. There is a long horrible string of various homeowners and corporations having "midnight" disposal to bypass the "cost" of garbage.

One furniture foam company gave some of the employees extra money to get rid of the toxic chemicals from foam making. They drove to the next county and dumped all the toxic waste into a pit on a farm.

 

We need robust pre-cycling, recycling and reuse to minimize all discards - nationwide. The bottling companies have not followed through on their promises to recycle their containers. Many communities charge by mass for refuse and acknowledge credit for recyclables. In every community, recyclables should be a "profit center" not a cost center by reducing tipping fees and generating revenue from recycling. Germany has led the way and has successful, profitable pre- and recycling. Certainly we can meet or exceed Germany's standards.

 

Here in New York State, we have deposits on cans and bottles. But it's only 5 cents.

I never bother to collect on the deposits. I always end up just recycling the cans and bottles.

In New York City, when the recycling bags of cans and bottles are put out on the sidewalk for collection, they usually end up being rummaged through for the deposit cans and bottles by people who could use the money and who end up collecting and bringing them to the supermarkets for redemption. I'd be happy if the deposits went up to 10 cents. That way those deposit cans and bottles collectors could make more money.

 

You have this backward. With bottle deposits, you are not charging for trash, you are making the consumer pay up front, before the item becomes trash. There is an incentive to recycle the item, just the opposite of charging for trash.

In Michigan we have been paying 10 cents per can and bottle for twenty years, and it works pretty well.

Tom

 

The term of art is "pay-as-you-throw" or "pay-per-throw". Obviously, it won't work in every case, but the EPA website lists some success stories where even a tiny fee per trash bag (e.g, $1) resulted in almost unbelievable reductions in the waste stream. See here for the EPA discussion:

Success Stories | Publications | Pay-As-You-Throw | Wastes | US EPA

I lobbied (unsuccessfully) for my otherwise very green-oriented town to move to that system.

 

Tom, I think "FL_Prius_Driver" was responding to "neon tetra"'s comment stating that we should also start charging per pound for trash.

 

Danny understood, in spite of my unclear statement. I fully support the "positive" economic model.

Charging for garbage works good enough with one utility cost combined with water, sewer, and garbage pickup. However, charging for "extra" garbage has resulted in extreme littering and business dumpsters getting packed within hours of being emptied.

 

Bottle/can deposit will never happen in Wisconsin - beer lobby & the tavern league will make sure of that.

 

i traveled to china last year. one thing i noticed is that when you finished a bottle of water, people would approach you and ask for the empty. this occurred at all of the major tourist sites in bejing - tiannamen square, forbidden city, etc.

presumabably they were refilling them with tap (city) water and reselling them to tourists as purified bottled water, but at least many of the bottles got recycled.

sometimes ideas from the past work - when i was growing up, kids picked up bottles in wagons, took them to the local store, and traded them in for enough money to get some candy bars - kept the trash off the streets. of course, back then, the bottles were glass, not plastic... but it worked.

 

They never went away here.
Plastic drink bottles, milk cartons and drink cans all have a 5 cent deposit and there is talk of doubling it. South Australia recycles about 60% of drink containers.

 

The EPA's systematic study says it's largely not an issue for pay-per-throw systems:

Illegal Diversion | Topics | Pay-As-You-Throw | Wastes | US EPA

 

Thanks for the link. I did quite a bit of reading to see what was valid and what may not have been. (Quick Summary on PAYT results in increased illegal dumping: 48%=no change, 19%=increase, 6%=decrease, 27%=no data). These were interesting results since human nature is the same across most communities, so I tried to find what was different between the PAYT illegal dumping results. After a while it finally fell out.

The community implementations fell between two extremes:

GOOD EXTREME-When the PAYT was part of an integrated system where the owner could save money by pulling all the recyclables out of the "charged" trash into the "uncharged" recycle bin, then PAYT is good system. Also part of the good systems are slowly phased in, allowing community adaptation to take place.

BAD EXTREME-The system was just a blind hike of garbage billing with no easy option of reducing trash other than finding somewhere else to dump cheaper.

Having done my homework, Thanks chogan2 - I have to retract my original statement (for communities that do it right).

 

Yeah, it's been around for a long time in New York. Does it help, well maybe, a little. Still some bottles/cans, like juice and Iced Tea bottles have no redemption so they are often littered upon our road ways. If they get more when redemed then they'll cost more to buy. It's a no win type of thing. I too tend to toss them in my recycle bind instead of toteing them off to the store to get my nickels back.