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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Bottle bills always
cause tempers to popAngry discussions arising about implementation of Hawaii's so-called "bottle bill" caused a number of memories to surface regarding this contentious brand of recycling.
First it took me back to Bellevue, Neb., when I was 10 years old and my buddy and I had a sweet little scam going involving soda bottles.
We'd get together on Saturday mornings, gather up whatever redeemable bottles either of our households had on hand and walk to the closest little store to turn them in. Along the way, we'd inevitably find other bottles on the side of the road.
We'd hand the bottles over to the store owner and get, I believe, only about a penny or two per bottle. But that was fine with us because we were entrepreneurs and had a system of recycling that assured our little pockets would be full of Coke and candy money by lunch time.
The storekeeper usually would put the bottles we turned in out behind his store in the alley. We'd go around the back, pick up the bottles we just turned in and head for another store. We'd repeat the process until we had enough cash to keep us on a glorious sugar high the rest of the day.
Fast-forward to Wheeling, W. Va., heart of steel country in the Ohio Valley, where, in a misguided attempt at being cool during my first newspaper job, I wrote an op-ed piece suggesting that West Virginia and Ohio adopt "bottle bills." To propose the enactment of a bottle bill -- viewed in that part of the country as an expensive recycling scheme that would cost many steelworkers their jobs -- was something like standing in the middle of Fallujah, Iraq, wearing a George Bush mask and singing "Amazing Grace" to passing Sunnis and Shiites.
I received many invitations to visit the huge smelter plant just up the road from Wheeling, which I declined on the grounds that I did not want to become a steel bridge girder.
NOW, HERE WE are in Hawaii arguing about bottle bills with the same passion, with, hopefully, none of the homicidal intent.
The good thing about bottle bills is that they turn everyday waste into things of value. Things of value generally aren't tossed out of car windows or left strewn on beaches.
The bad thing is that dirty bottles are stinky cockroach attracters that most small-business owners don't want to store on their property. The other bad thing about Hawaii's bottle bill is that it includes a 1-cent-per-container payoff to the state. In gambling circles they call that payment the "vigorish" or "vig," the cost of doing business with the friendly neighborhood bookie.
Recycling beverage containers is a good idea, but our bottle bill needs some brutal corrective surgery. Most important, we need to make the program a private enterprise between consumers and suppliers and get the government's greedy fingers out of the process. Otherwise, the entire plastic bottled water industry will die and we'll be back to drinking tap water.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com