Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag?
They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them. It’s no wonder some states have banned them and stores give discounts to customers with reusable bags.
But the plastics industry is working to make the public feel OK about using them again.
Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.
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The deposit system is way better environmentally though. Washing and reusing is a pittance compared to any type of recycling. I guarantee you would not see as much breaking of them. Oberweiss last I knew the deposit was two bucks but that was before the recent inflation.
I’m sure that’s part of it. Here, glass bottles have the same 5¢ deposit as any other beverage bottle. It should be much higher.
This is also an interesting situation, where many people believe we should stop the bottle deposits and returns, since we now have single stream recycling for everything. It’s a great theory, but I do remember how much the bottle deposit helped clean up the environment, and we need more of that. It’s not just the recycling but changing peoples behavior, or in the worst case scenario gicving people in less fortunate circumstances an incentive to clean up after the assholes. We should do more of this.
Of course there was also that Seinfeld episode attempting to game the system by driving bottle to Michigan and profit from the greater 10¢ deposit. It’s a good point that someone will always try to game the system, so it really needs to be a national thing in the US instead of the state-based patchwork it is now …… or the benefit of those reusable bottles was that companies would only take back their own
Oberweis does not cover my area although I imagine there’s similar that does.
yeah. five or ten cents aint gonna cut it and it does need to be nationally. its pretty easy to make sure all us products have a unique identifier so you can’t bring in from mexico or canada or such. I think of aldi and how you never have a loose cart and they never pay anyone to clean up the lot and they don’t have to use up parking space for convenient cart returns. Then if some lady is to concerned about her safety (yeah this is a reference) someone will still return it. I keep on thinking they will somehow need to go above a quarter but so far a quarter works for that.
A quarter sounds good, or at least is a good place to start
I have to admit I no longer return cans and bottles, despite that they’re more likely to get recycled when you return thenm. However I’ve been trying to cut back on things like soda anyway, and I’m not going out of my way for a dime to a quarter per week. They go in with the rest of the recycling. We did have a guy coming through collecting cans and bottles from recycling bins so I tried saving mine off to the side so he wouldn’t have to dig for them, but he hasn’t been around in a long time
yeah even without the deposit like we have here aluminum brings in enough for folks to collecte. I used to seperate it into a grocery bag and hang it on the fence for first come first serve with the alley pickers.