Dumping on ex-Mainer's bottle bill

[jpak]

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/nemitz/060329nemitz.shtml

If Marge Davis had a nickel for every bottle and can she sees lying along the roadside near her home, she'd be . . . never mind. Down in her neck of the woods, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

"It certainly will not pass this year," Davis, who grew up in Portland and now lives in Mount Juliet, Tenn., said of her beloved bottle bill, which gets its first hearing before Tennessee's legislature today. "These things are so incremental - it took California 10 years to pass a bottle bill."

That's right, folks. Three decades after Maine decided to put its money where its empties were - and in the process cleaned up its roadsides virtually overnight - many states continue to trash returnable bottles and cans as the work of environmental extremists who'll stop at nothing to . . . cut down on litter?

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[LisaM]

1. Oregon has one, and Washington does not

the difference on the roadsides is immeasurable.

[phantom power]

2. The obvious (?) benefits of recycling aside...

it's sad that people need a financial incentive to prevent them from tossing #@!#!$ trash out the window. I've never understood why it's such a damned burden for some people to hold onto their trash until they can get to a trash-can.

[GrumpyGreg]

3. Massachusetts has one and the can collector folks go around early in

the morning collecting cans.

There was a lady in my neighborhood with large green plastic bags full of them. She would use a supermarket cart with the bags tied on.

No cans in sight,even after 4th of July fireworks and festivites..

[MADem]

7. With all the damn crap we drink, we get a tank of gas a month out of

those empties!!! Hell, we turn them in, not put them at the curb. Waste not, want not!

[John Q. Citizen]

4. My ex-State Senator (d) years ago in CA was the guy who kept

blocking the bottle bill in the lege.

Can't even remember his name now, but one of his big supporters was a bottler in the central coast area.

When they finally passed a bill he was instumental in keeping the return/deposit very low, 3 cents I recall, even as Maine was paying ten cents a bottle.

[jpak]

5. Maine's bottle bill was my first environmental campaign

The ads sponsored by the beverage industry back-fired completely.

They featured a rich hoity-toity Flatlander (in pearls) complaining (using Mrs. Thurston Howell the 3rd accent) that used bottles were "unsanitary" and she didn't want them in her house (!!!).

Bad move on their part....

:evilgrin:

[phantom power]

6. And now that woman's son is president. Where did we go wrong?