April 20, 2011
Opinion
Fed up with litter? It's time to bring a container deposit law to Maryland
Earth Day is right around the corner and no doubt there will be people out doing something that unfortunately needs to be done every spring: picking up trash alongside our roadways.
We at the paper have received some correspondence about the subject of roadside trash, some unsolicited and some in response to my colleague Allan Vought’s column lamenting the slovenly state of a society that thinks nothing of dumping in parks and along roadways.
Unfortunately, it seems the problem has a certain unsolvable quality to it. Litter may not be as certain as death and taxes, but it sometimes seems like it is.
Seems as though every year various groups who participate in the state and county adopt-a-road programs head out at about this time of year and have shockingly little trouble filling up bag after bag with an array of garbage.
Similarly, there will be the annual Riversweep of the banks of the Susquehanna River and tons of garbage will be picked up and properly disposed of. Seems as though the take should be less and less with each passing year, but it never is. The miscreants among us have a seemingly unending ability to desecrate the land where we live by unloading everything from candy wrappers to construction debris in places where garbage doesn’t belong.
The unfortunate reality seems to be that there will always be people who are willing to defile the places where they live.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for dealing with the rogue disposal of things like diapers and old dishwashers. I do, however, have a solution to the problem of bottles, cans and jars made of glass, metal and plastic. The solution is as old as bottles: charge a deposit fee.
Way back when I was a kid, this was standard practice for those old green Coke bottles, not to mention the bottles of more than a few brands of soda. You’d have been hard-pressed in my neighborhood, or just about anywhere else, to find a bottle with a nickel deposit bounty on its head. If someone was so careless as to disregard such a treasure, some enterprising kid would pick it up and find a way to cash it in.
It’s been many years since the days of bottle deposits of this kind. Convenience was their demise. While some soft drinks were available in bottles marked for deposit, other soft drink companies proudly advertised the convenience of their products with the slogan, “No deposit, no return.”
But that wasn’t the end of cashing in on bottles and cans. Over the years, many states have enacted laws requiring the charging of deposits. One place I have some limited familiarity with is New York State, where just about every grocery store has a machine out front where you can deposit bottles and cans and get back some cash. It’s not a lot, but it is enough to make it worth doing, and, as a result I’d bet bottles and cans comprise a smaller portion of the roadside trash in the Empire State (and the dozen or so other states that have deposit requirements).
This idea has been proposed in Maryland before, having been brought up in the General Assembly. If it was pushed at all this year, it wasn’t at a very high profile and nothing happened with it. In the past, though, when it has been a high-profile issue, deposit requirements have been killed off primarily for two reasons. One is that government regulation is always a bad notion that holds sway in certain political circles. The other reason often cited is that it is a burden for the companies that sell products in bottles and cans.
In my mind, neither argument holds water. If it can be done in New York, Delaware, Oregon and other states, without affecting the public’s access to soda and beer, it can be done in Maryland, too.
As far as the merits of government regulation, if a simple container deposit law can make the government-owned street sides a little cleaner, that’s not a bad thing at all.
http://www.exploreharford.com/opinion/8689/fed-up-with-litter-its-time-bring-container-deposit-law-maryland/
