Honolulu Lite
It's difficult for me to oppose a so-called "bottle bill" in Hawaii, seeing as how collecting bottles for money as a kid was one of the first (and, sadly, ultimately one of the few) moneymaking enterprises in my life. There’s a message
in bottle billWe were living in Nebraska at the time, and a few of my sixth-grade buddies and I discovered we could make money collecting discarded bottles on the side of the roads and turning them in to stores for 2 cents a pop. It was hot work, though, dragging our little butts up and down the highways collecting bottles. In those days, bottles were heavy and indestructible. You could actually hammer a nail in a piece of wood with a Coke bottle. So it took two of us to lug a case of 24 bottles to the store for a measly 48 cents.
We didn't care if we were doing anything good for the environment. In fact, it wasn't long before we -- budding little criminals that we were -- figured out an easier way to collect bottles. We'd simply go to the back of a little store where the owner put out his empty bottles and cart away a couple of cases of them. We'd take these to another store and turn them in for almost a buck. That owner would stick them outside his back door. We'd pick them up and haul them to another store, and so forth. By noon on Saturdays, we'd be fairly gorged on sodas and candy financed by our recycling business. True, there was a certain amount of dishonesty in our methods, but you have to give us points for ingenuity.
My other bottle-bill memory is not so fond. It relates to the first death threat I received as a newspaper reporter.
I was working on my first newspaper in Wheeling, W.Va., which sits right along the Ohio River in the heart of steel production country. My editors let me write a column proposing a bottle bill, which in steel country is like proposing the Black Plague be unleashed throughout the land and that any survivors be beaten to death with baseball bats. It was incredibly irresponsible -- not to mention sadistic -- of my editors to let me write that column. I received many letters from guys with names like Spike and Rufus inviting me to visit their smelting plants, at which time they'd make sure I would take a dip in one of those huge vats of molten metal. I don't know if I really would have been killed had I gone. ... Well, actually, I do know. I would have been killed. I would have been turned into beer cans.
So all these years later, bottle bills are still controversial. The state Legislature will vote on one this week that would mandate a refundable deposit on most beverage containers.
My only question is, Why are legislators diddling around with a bottle bill instead of putting all their focus on the state's $300 million deficit?
That timing issue aside, a bottle bill probably is a good thing. And, God knows, it would give me something to do with my Saturdays.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com