No, this isn't about that old guy who used to live around here and sucked on a bottle, make that a flask, of kick-a-poo joy juice all day.
When I was a kid around here many thousands of days ago, about the only way to make a few cents for spending money was to go digging around in the local trash heaps of which there were quite a few, for discarded bottles! As I recall there were only a few that were redeemable at the Seaside Market. All of the large ones, about a quart and a half that said Coca Cola, Clicquot Club, Spur, an a couple others were worth 5 cents each! In todays money that would be like getting about three or four bucks back for a bottle. The small coke bottles were worth 2 cents each!
As tight as money was around here back then, you DID NOT see too many of these little gems lying around on the side of the road! And if you did, you just considered yourself one lucky SOB for that day!
So here is the chance for the State of RI to finally get it right. Someone has again introduced a bottle bill in the legislature. Does it have a chance of passing? Who knows. Who actually knows why all the previous ones were shot down in flames. It is probably because one or more of our, "elected officials" has friends or family in the plastic bottle fabrication business and they don't want any competition from already made containers.
But just think of the benefits of a bottle bill. All the poor, indigent, laborers could go out and get rich and live the American dream! The sides of the roads would be forever free of this type of trash! And after two or three years, the landfill at Johnston would be reduced to a tiny mole hill of inconspicuious height after they had picked it clean of those returnable bottles! No more worries about that,"plastic bottle that will be in the landfill for CENTURIES"!
So we give kudos too the person who introd'ed the bill, and can only hope that our fearless leaders will see fit to join with them in bringing our deficient state from the backwaters of time and place, into the reality of today! Besides being good for the visual aspect of it all, after Obama gets in, we are all going to need a little extra income to get those two elusive ends to meet! TIFN
4-23-24
7 hours ago
2 comments:
True, there's talk about implementing a bottle refund program that goes beyond glass beverage bottles to include plastic and such. It's really not a tax, since if you pay five cents a bottle, you get your five cents back when you turn them in.
But what makes me wonder is whether the US really recycles all that waste into new goods. Many of the glass manufacturers for example moved overseas and Mexico, for example, and with the high shipping costs these days it often is not economical to get rid of the stuff we're going through all the effort to reduce from the landfills. Same for newspapers. Aluminum cans are a good market for recycling with their high costs per ton, but I'm sure the six kinds of plastic make plastic recycling something of a challenge - it's cheaper just to make them new.
So aside from aluminum cans, I suspect that not much recycled goods are really getting remanufactured. I've seen it is person at the large regional dumps, where glass and newspaper was dumped into the hole because they couldn't sell the stuff, and it was cheaper just to bury it. It's a HUGE problem.
Even waste brush and tree cuttings are a problem. This must be stored in huge piles that often catch fire and leach brown toxic waste into the rivers. You can't sell enough of it even at low prices of $25 a ton. It piles and piles ... and the politicians take credit for doing a really great job!
See a trend here? I think most landfill operators treat recycling as a big pain in the tush, just so they can make a killing off regular old municipal waste.
Ev, I remember we used to look for bottles as we walked to school and back every day. Three bottles would get you a coke, which was .06 cents in those days. There is a market for all of the recycleables and a lot of smaller companies that make a living from them (mostly in tile and similar products).
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