For the past month, our neighbors have been paying for some of our necessities. Sometimes it’s deodorant or shampoo, sometimes it’s half-and-half or eggs. More often, because we buy them most regularly, it’s cat food and kitty litter. I didn’t ask the other people in the building for their financial assistance; they don’t even know they’re providing it. But it is their money, all the same.
Far from a tale of good neighborliness (or theft), this is a story of how good public policy and “green” legislation have ended up (once again) benefiting business, due either to citizen unawareness or simply our laziness; and how I took a little time to skim from the middlemen. But to understand the process, we must follow the trail from the recycling room on my floor through the intermediate steps to the goods paid for by my neighbors -- not to mention the money trail before and after.
The State of Oregon was the first in the U.S. to pass a Bottle Bill, ’way back in 1971, when I was starting the seventh grade. Vermont had passed a law in the mid 1950s that banned non-returnable bottles but the beer industry killed that after just a few years; British Columbia passed a beverage deposit law in 1970; but Oregon’s was the first in the nation to pass and stick.
The law requires all cans, bottles, and other containers of carbonated soft drinks and beer -- glass, plastic, and aluminum -- sold in Oregon to be returnable for a minimum deposit (usually 5 cents each). In 2009, the law was extended to bottled water containers as well. About 90 percent of all the containers sold get recycled in Oregon, as opposed to an average of 28 percent in states that do not have such legislation.
This law has been credited with reducing roadside litter and increased recycling. Materials that used to create 40 percent of litter now make up only 6 percent. We are so used to this set-up in Oregon that it’s surprising to be reminded that only 10 other states (Vermont, Maine, Michigan, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, Delaware, California, and Hawaii) have similar laws in place. Only Maine, California, and Hawaii also include bottled water containers.
Hundreds of people buy six-packs, twelve-packs, and “suitcases” of beer and soda and water at the supermarket on the ground floor of my apartment building every day. They have to pay a five-cent deposit on every single container at the cash register. The store passes all that deposit money on to the distributor who brings in those drinks by the case and pallet-load. Those five-cents-per-container deposits have to add up.
Back in mid April, while pouring trash paper in the bin at the recycling room on my floor our apartment building, I was struck by how many redeemable aluminum cans were in the bin, and glass beer bottles in the next one over. My neighbors who had drunk the contents of those containers could get that deposit money back just downstairs -- there’s a bank of bottle recycling machines at ground level, just around the corner -- but they weren’t doing it.
How many containers, how much money, could I amass if I scrounged them out of the recycling bins on all six inhabited floors of my building? Could I collect a hundred dollars from my neighbors by the end of the year? I decided to give it a try.
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