I can see by yesterday's Frazz comic that Frazz lives in Connecticut or some other state that charges a few pennies extra for certain bottles and cans (mostly drink, such as soda and beer—but not water; I have yet to figure it all out), and then gives them back to you if you return the bottle to the grocery store.
What I still don't get about this system is, Why? I mean, I understood it when I was growing up, eons ago, because the bottles were reused. On the very rare occasions when we had beer or soda in the house, we were happy to return the bottles for the nickels they brought (five cents was worth a lot more back then), and so that the companies could refill them. We always put our empty milk bottles back out on the porch for the milkman to retrieve—not for money, but so that he would in turn leave us bottles full of (pasteurized, but not homogenized) milk.
But those days were long ago and far away. No one reuses bottles, and certainly not aluminum cans. I assume that they are all sent from the grocery store to a recycling center. Is a nickel, or even a dime, worth the effort of storing and returning the containers? The real value is in the recycling. The Swiss go through that effort because that's the way recycling is done there—there are no 5-rappen tips for doing what's right. In our town in Florida, we collect all recyclables in one bin which is then picked up at our homes weekly. It's as easy as throwing them in the trash.
The states that I know of that put a deposit on certain recyclables also have home recycling, so wouldn't the marginal cost of picking up all bottles and cans be almost nil? Why, then, do they continue the old practice?
