Devil in the Bottle Bill

The GTS as pack mule. George had to move. (Orin O'Neill photo)

Remember when I said in Oregon buying something for three dollars means it actually costs three dollars? Well, there is an exception.

If you buy a soft drink, or bottled water or some kinds of juice, you must pay a 5-cent deposit on each container. So that 99¢ 20-ounce Diet Coke will actually run you $1.04.

Oregon was one of the first states to enact a “Bottle Bill,” aka a mandatory deposit on soft-drink containers. Other states followed suit, but Washington was not one of them, even though there were at least three attempts to pass a law by citizen initiative. Then there’s the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer and Newman were going to redeem a postal van full of bottles in Michigan, which charges a 10-cent deposit.

Before Oregon passed the law, bottle deposits were fairly common. The local Coke or Pepsi or whatever bottler charged the stores a deposit, which was passed on to their customers. You got the deposit back when you returned the bottles, which were made of glass and were usually rather artfully designed (the classic Coke bottle was redesigned by Raymond Loewy, one of the world’s best-known industrial designers). Heck, I used to go around the apartment complex where I lived as a kid and hit people up for empty bottles, which they gladly gave (the deposits were 2 or 3 cents).

I don’t imagine the framers of the Bottle Bill envisioned 2-liter plastic bottles. And I don’t imagine they thought the deposit would still be 5¢ in the year 2009.

When I first started visiting Oregon regularly in 1980, people were quite conscientious about gathering bottles and cans. When I camped out in Bend a few years ago, the city had just begun curbside recycling, with containers for glass, aluminum and plastic. No deposit returned.

In fact, most people toss soft-drink containers into the nearest trash receptacle. You see homeless people rooting through trash barrels and Dumpsters all over Portland. The law allows redemption of 144 containers per day.

Things aren’t that bad, at least not yet. I had to go to Fred Meyer anyway, so why not gather up the 2-liter bottles?

As you can see, it can be a logistical challenge carrying large numbers of 2-liter bottles. I had to climb onto the floorboard and swing my right leg over the seat to clear what was attached to the grocery-bag hook. And I had to roust George from his spot in the sunshine. He was not pleased.

Last time I lived in Portland, you gave your bottles and cans to a human being. Now you feed them to a machine.

A machine made by a company in Portland, oddly enough. You stuff the container in the hole, a door closes, a bunch of noise is made, and your tally is incremented by one. When you’re done, press the red button and out pops a receipt which you take inside to receive payment.

The picture doesn’t convey just how icky the front of the machine is. In theory, you’re supposed to at least rinse the container out before recycling it (I did), but nobody does that. When it was warmer, the machine smelled bad, and there was a sticky goop on the sidewalk, too.

Back in the day, the soft-drink bottler took the empties, washed them and re-used them. Remember, they were made of glass. While the aluminum and glass get melted down and made into high-value stuff, the recycling of plastic drink bottles has always smacked slightly of desperation. Hey, we can make park benches out of this stuff! Or maybe plastic body parts for Chinese scooters. Or something.

I had exactly 17 plastic 2-liter bottles to feed to the machine. At a nickel each, I came away with exactly 85¢. Not enough for bus fare, or a lottery ticket, or even a cuppa at the Starbucks inside Fred Meyer. Some other folks ahead of me in line had the legal limit, but they either spent a lot of time rooting through garbage or drank an awful lot of beer.

The world has changed quite a lot in 38 years. It would make sense to rethink the idea of the Bottle Bill. Maybe the deposit should be raised to a level that would make it worth peoples’ while to recycle the stuff. Or possibly the low-value plastic stuff could be taken out of the equation and handled some other way, which may or may not involve a deposit.

But the way it’s been done is the way it’s always been done, so what’s most likely to happen is nothing. That seems true for a lot of things these days.