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Your Government Inaction: Bottle Bills
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I paid a visit to our daughter in Massachusetts. In the parking lot of her apartment, I discovered this delightful tableau:
Now I know what you’re thinking: How could this be? Doesn’t Massachusetts have a bottle bill?
Bottle bills were originally introduced in the 1970s as a roadside pollution control measure. The idea is simplicity itself in concept. When the consumer buys a beverage in a disposable container there is a charge or deposit that is returned when the consumer brings the empty can or bottle back to the store. Proponents of the law also asserted that it would increase recycling and reduce the volume of trash going into landfills.
As I’ve shared in this space before, I was a recycler before recycling was cool. My Mom helped set up the first recycling center in Santa Fe, NM, and I earned a lot of pocket money into my teens recycling aluminum cans and deposit bottles I picked up. When I heard that the State of New Mexico was considering adopting a bottle law, I thought it would be a great idea. Then I looked at the details. Apparently the state legislators also actually looked at the details, because, mirable dictu, the bill did not pass.
Massachusetts, on the other hand, adopted a bottle bill in 1983. Consumers were charged a nickel for every can or bottle containing “beer and other malt beverages, carbonated soft drinks, {or} mineral waters.” Containers holding “Wine, dairy products, natural fruit juices, non-carbonated drinks, and alcoholic beverages other than beer and malt beverages” were exempt because no one who consumes any of those beverages ever litters, doncha know. I’m sure that the fact that wine drinkers are, ahem, a different class than the proles who drink beer has nothing to do with that part of the law. Care to guess what the most common beverage sold under the “non-carbonated drinks” category is? I’ll give you a clue: Two of the containers in the photo above used to be filled with this substance. Yes, it’s our old friend Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Now when you want to return the container, it’s a simple process. Here is a helpful two-page, fourteen-point guide from the state on how to get your own money back:
I’ll give the highlights for those of you who didn’t want to read the whole thing. If a business doesn’t sell that particular item, you don’t get your money back. If the container is not empty, free of debris, and “reasonably intact,” you don’t get your money back. You can’t get your deposit back on more than 120 containers ($6.00) a day. If the specific product has been discontinued at that store for more than two months, you don’t get your money back.
To my eyes, the most interesting point in this list is the last one. You can be fined $100 for asking for a 5¢ refund on a soda can bought out of state. Massachusetts is bordered by five other states and within twenty miles of a sixth, so a lot of beverage containers are carried in from other states. Apparently, no one from out-of-state litters in Massachusetts. I would guess that the number of cans and bottles purchased in Massachusetts and taken out of state would be about the same as the number being brought in. Anyway, why does it matter if your goal is to reduce littering, increase recycling, and decrease the volume of trash going into landfills?
I’m kidding, of course. There is a very good reason for making it illegal, with stiff penalties, to ask for refunds on containers brought from out of state. Tell me in the comments if you think you know why.
My daughter told me that she doesn’t return beverage containers for refunds anymore “because the machines never accept them.” I decided to test the process out myself. I went to a nearby supermarket and found this outside one of the doors:
Supposedly, you just place your can or bottle in the circular opening of the correct machine and it returns a slip you can either cash in or use for store credit. I had three plastic pop bottles that I had actually purchased at another store. The ‘Plastic’ machine accepted them and gave me a credit slip. The ‘Can’ machine, on the other hand, did not accept a single one of the aluminum cans I proffered. This included a Rockstar® energy drink can that I’d found. There was a trash can next to the machines, but no recycling bin. So much for reducing waste and increasing recycling. As I walked into the store to get my 15¢, I observed a Rockstar® display. I guess the machine hadn’t gotten the memo.
I wanted to try some other options, but, oddly, my wife and daughter said they had better things to do than finding regional recycling centers or haggling with clerks at drug, convenience, and liquor stores. And apparently, a lot of other people feel the same way. All the roadblocks to getting the deposits have made people less likely to do so. According to this page from a pro bottle bill website, the number of containers returned has steadily decreased over the last decade, reaching just 50% in 2019. And that was before Massachusetts suspended the returns altogether in 2020 due to the Wuhan Virus. Of course, they kept charging a nickel for every can or bottle being purchased.
Because that money all goes to the state; every penny that a store takes in above redemptions has to be sent along to the State of Massachusetts. In other words, the bottle bill is just a sneaky tax on people who drink the wrong kind of beverages and don’t want to go through the hassle of overcoming the barriers the state has put in their way.
Bottle bill proponents also say that the program employs “2000-2400” people across the state. They mention a few productive jobs, like the people who process material for recycling. I’ll bet most of those people would have jobs anyway if recycling was entirely run by private industry. Most of the jobs are unproductive make-work positions that wouldn’t exist if the state didn’t sneakily take millions of dollars from consumers. There are lawyers, accountants, and inspectors to ensure that retailers are following the law. And truck drivers. Lots of truck drivers.
I did an experiment where I compared the volume of “reasonably intact” cans to flattened cans:
Three intact cans take up about the same amount of space as 18 flattened cans. In other words, the law requires you to use six times as much gas, put six times as much wear and tear on roads and equipment, and, most importantly, employ six times as many truck drivers to transport the same amount of material.
So, you have a law that was supposed to:
A. Reduce litter.
B. Increase recycling.
C. Decrease landfill usage.
Instead, the law actually:
D. Extracts money consumers and gives it to the government.
E. Creates unproductive government jobs.
F. Punishes consumers of certain low-status products.
G. May or may not accomplish goals A, B, and C, but. . .
H. Makes elites and politicians feel good about themselves.
Old habits die hard, and I continue to recycle all the cans I use. I also pick up cans I find on the street or in a parking lot and toss them in a bag in the garage. Texas doesn’t have a bottle bill, so every month or so I take the cans to a nearby recycling center. There is not a two-page, fourteen-point guide posted telling me how to recycle. I hand a guy the sack of cans. He doesn’t care what was in the cans or where they came from. It doesn’t matter to him if the cans are not “free of debris and reasonably intact.” I can bring as many cans as I want to be recycled, the more the better. He puts the bag on a scale and gives me some cash. The entire transaction takes two minutes and I end up with about a penny per can.
You may think that 1¢ is not much, but it’s more than any Massachusetts resident gets. The person who can’t or won’t return containers is losing 5¢ on each purchase. The average consumer there is losing 2½¢. The die-hard recycler, who carefully sorts and stores the cans and bottles, has to work a lot harder than me just to break even.
A couple of years ago, I visited my brother in California. While there, I saw people pulling returnable cans and bottles out of residential recycling bins on trash day. I also saw the police detaining and citing those same people for doing that. If the purpose of bottle bills is to decrease litter, increase recycling, and reduce solid waste in landfills, what does it matter who is collecting the containers?
A little later, my brother came to visit me in Texas. He commented on how clean the streets were compared to California. I know what you’re thinking: How could that be? Doesn’t California have a bottle bill?
Published in Humor
That’s way too much work. I remember when we lived in MA, there were can and bottle drives at the fire station – they collected large amounts and they were recycled. I worked for a national outdoor recreation company up there and many of the playgrounds and other things were made from recycled bottles and cans. It shouldn’t be so hard to recycle.
“Don’t Mess With TEXAS”
I remember the bottle bill passing in Maine, but I also remember pulling a kids wagon load of bottles down to the corner store long before the bottle bill, when almost everything was in glass bottles. I assume the soft drink bottlers just cleaned them and reused them but I don’t really know.
I stopped in a small Montana mountain town with my brother once (in 1976; we were working a construction job in Alberta as illegal aliens – seriously) and the A and W root beer place had a sign that said “we will pay for one gallon bottles that fit our lid”. The shelf to the side of the counter was full of a variety of glass bottles. That right there was true recycling.
Whenever we travel outside of Texas I’m surprised at the amount of trash on the roadways.
Great post, and it points up something I’ve complained about repeatedly–the difficulties and barriers that, in general, make recycling, and keeping trash out of landfills something that most people just can’t be bothered with. I live out in the country, and it’s not unusual to see televisions, microwaves, mattresses, and Lord knows what else thrown down the hillside at the side of the road. The township makes periodic forays to gather it up it when they can. And I grumble about and swear at the perpetrators.
But then I have something I want to get rid of, and I start looking around to see where I can take it, or what I can do with it. And quite often, I find that nobody wants it, and I can’t throw it out with my regular trash. And I think to myself, “well, I’m not surprised people throw stuff out by the side of the road, or hide things in their weekly trash pickup bags.”
If keeping stuff out of landfills, and actually doing something useful about trash and waste actually was an environmental priority because of environmental concerns, rather than just another useless virtue-signalling exercise, things would be different. But then I don’t suppose politicians would have any sway over the matter, and they wouldn’t be in the news.
This post is the type of investigative reporting an aspiring local journalist could do to make a name for herself – the stupidity of some recycling laws.
You’ve just described a huge problem I see too. What to do with large household items like lamps and microwave ovens.
That we don’t have a way to handle these easily is proof that we are really disorganized in this country.
It’s leading to problems especially in small and medium and large cities. The living spaces of poorer people are really clogged up with useless big stuff because it is so hard to get rid of it.
I will never live in a town that has only trash pickup. I go to our landfill-recycling center two or three times a week. It’s really easy for me to get there. And it’s beautifully organized and very pleasant. I know what to do with every single item I need to get rid of. But it has taken twenty years of our town trying to figure this out to get this point.
Addressing this issue adds value to people’s homes because it’s easier to take care of them, reduces big and small litter, and leads to neat and tidy towns.
Civic engagement. That is the answer to almost everything, I think. :-)
This post would make a great case study for a problems in democracy course. It has everything in it–from unintended consequences of laws and regulations to bills that were passed without an expiration date. And students would be able to learn from it because it’s a relatively unemotional subject.
It also has a strong bearing on the homeless camps and the conditions of our cities that are overwhelmed with trash right now. See Kent’s post below. :-)
This issue is so important.
I recycle things that are easy to recycle. Newspapers and cardboard. Our trash service provides a separate receptacle for these items. I’ve read that they can’t really sell this stuff anymore but I do it because it’s just as easy as throwing stuff away. I don’t bother with cans and bottles because I’m not going to keep a separate receptacle in my house and I don’t know the rules anyway.
Your post has inspired me this morning. It deals with one of my pet peeves with modern life: recycling food-bearing containers.
At least half of our six-hour town meetings used to be taken up by recycling issues and solid-waste disposal. It took us a long time to hammer out a good system.
Invariably the old timers in town would remind us that if we made it hard or expensive or complicated to dispose of trash, the result would be rats and litter. In the twentieth century, trash pickup and disposal became a town responsibility and was paid for out of the general tax fund, not with separate ever-rising fees, as a matter of public health, mostly rodents.
I know a guy who routinely filled his car with empty beverage cans and bottles collected at a social club in Pittsburgh, and drove them to Buffalo every other week to collect the nickel deposits. These deposits were used to pay for the gas required to make the trip, which allowed him to visit his kids per visitation allowance. Those were extremely lean times. Without those nickels, he wouldn’t have been able to make those trips.
Indeed, the “Don’t Mess with Texas” has been a very successful campaign. That and some pro-active cleanup (adopt a highway program) and things stay clean.
Any government program that “create” jobs should be considered mandated inefficiency. You know the old joke about if people digging with shovels creates more jobs, then have them dig with spoons.
Recycling in general is probably a net waste of resources. Landfills are cheap and we know Wall-E will recycle that stuff later.
Once again, progressive policies create just the opposite result of their stated purpose.
Our recycler no longer takes glass bottles because it is too hard on the machinery. Glass, which was once recycled, now goes in the garbage.
It seems that corrugated cardboard boxes are proliferating now. Much of my recycling time is spent in cutting boxes down to size. The boxes must be kept dry in a covered container. They don’t want them wet. We can’t recycle plastic bags, according to the rules. We are not supposed to use the big blue recycling bags anymore, so the aluminum cans and plastic bottles that used to be contained inside them on windy days must now be in a covered container or they will blow all over the street. Some fun.
Recycling is Bullsh#t
Hysterical example of how gullible Progs are.
Language warning. Hey, it’s Penn Gillette.
Unfortunately some of the people who pull cans and bottles out of residential recycling bins on trash day do not replace the other material back into the recycling bin, and create a mess. That problem also shows up with the trash pickers who on trash day come by looking for lamps, bed frames, and other items they think they can refurbish and resell. Too often they create a mess in the process, which is unfortunate, since their services can be useful.
The same thinking drives taxes on “high calorie sugary beverages” that apply to carbonated soft drinks but not to fancy coffees or cocktails that have just as many calories.
As I recall, when recycling first became a thing, mayors and county councils were thrilled that they could actually sell separated garbage to recycling plants. Then the market became almost instantly oversaturated and the payments dropped accordingly. One knowledgeable person told me a few years ago, that recycling in a lot of areas just means that we have separate landfill batches–It would be political suicide to drop the recycling requirements.
In 1991, Al Gore went from praising high-temp incinerators (small volume of ash left) to decrying it not because of air pollution (there is not much if it is hot enough) or even CO2 but because the greenies were opposed to anything that makes trash disposal convenient so as to inhibit the consumer economy.
I like the idea of better-conceived packaging materials and recycling but I hate the religious overtones.
Exactly.
To keep Kramer and Newman from scamming paying recycling states.
That’s just an excuse. The real reason is that municipalities don’t want people taking the dollars they earn from profitable recyclables. Of course, the state also has a vested interest in people not getting the deposit back.
When I lived in Sacramento, they made a huge deal about the new automated garbage trucks that only needed a 1 person crew, and how much money it was going to save.
So then they passed the mandatory recycling ordinance.
And the 1 person garbage truck was followed by the 3 person recycling truck.
Progress.
How do you dispose of mattresses? I had a lady living next door and she pulled out a saber saw and spend all day cutting it up into foot-long pieces and putting them into trash bags. She put out two bags in her trash each collection day, and in a couple of weeks, it was all gone. :)
In an area with a homeless population, throwing your aluminum cans in the street isn’t littering, it’s charity.
Thank goodness! How did it take 13 comments for someone to post a Seinfeld clip??
Terrific post, @josepluma. Any chance you can send a version to the Massachusetts Powers-That-Be? Or have your daughter send it so it’s from a resident of the state?
We just did that with our old charcoal grill. Mr AZ took it apart and put it into black plastic bags that would fit into our trash can. The lid of the can was opened up a little but we got it all in one can.
Good thought, but these days the homeless believe that picking up bottles and cans is beneath them.
The Powers-That-Be? You mean the people who are sneakily extracting millions of dollars from Massachusetts consumers and giving their cronies make-work jobs. I’ll get right on it.
Of course, I’ll be denounced for being against recycling and wanting to harm the environment.
Recycling is mostly not. Glass doesn’t get recycled since China stopped taking glass and plastic ends up in the landfill unless your town has a plastic recycling factory virtually next door (it is cost prohibitive to ship plastic waste as it is high volume and low weight). about the only thing that it is currently economically viable to recycle is paper (cardboard included) and metals(aluminum, brass, copper, etc.).
Aluminum recycling seems to work better where soda/beer-can recycling is considered just the value of the metal, not trying to get back 5 cents each. Arizona doesn’t have a deposit, but can-recycling is big there.