Letter to the Editor

For a Trash-Free Potomac, We Must Recycle

Once again, glass, plastic bottles and aluminum cans topped the list of trash picked up by volunteers during the 2006 Annual Potomac Watershed Spring Cleanup. Of 5,254 bags collected, 1,450 were filled with more than 70,000 bottles and cans.

Your paper's list of ideas for eliminating trash in the Potomac Watershed [editorial, April 11] should have included mandatory, refundable deposits on all beverage containers sold in the Washington region. That would do more to reduce trash in streams and streets than all of your suggestions combined.

Eleven states have cleaner streets and waterways, safer playgrounds, and more livable communities thanks to container deposit laws, also known as bottle bills.

Your editorial was right on two counts: The Alice Ferguson Foundation's goal of a "trash-free Potomac" by 2013 will "take some doing," and companies and local governments should join in. If the governments of Maryland, Virginia and the District, along with bottlers, distributors and retailers, joined in support of a regional law requiring deposits on beverage containers, container recycling rates would double within a year of enactment, and we just might realize the dream of a trash-free Potomac.

-- Patricia Franklin

Washington

The writer is executive director of the Container Recycling Institute.