Dialogue: Vote with our feet and bring back tidy refunds on bottles

An increasing environmental eyesore would be checked if a $1 deposit was payable oneach drink bottle, writes DAVID HILL*.

Spring gleams and glitters all over the place. So what is summer going to bring us?

Well, when I look back at last year's summer, I see bottles.

Empty bottles, plastic and glass, had record breeding seasons in recent summers. You have seen them rolling around in bus shelters and parking buildings, lying in gutters and downtown flowerbeds, strewn broken and lethal across footpaths.

I reckon we are getting more of them, and one reason is that there is no economic incentive to return them any more.

A few years back, a crate of large-sized beer bottles got you about $3.50 on return - with the crate. Now nobody wants to know about bottles.

Aluminium cans, sure - about $1.40 a kilo. But not a single business (in our province anyway) buys back glass and plastic bottles any longer.

Drink companies say they cannot afford it, one nice Mr Bottlestore told me. And, indeed, I had heard how soft-drink manufacturers moved to plastic a while back because it cost them too much to wash and reuse glass bottles. Sad to think of Coca-Cola being down to their last trillion dollars.

So companies cannot afford the cost of receiving and recycling their used bottles? Well, I would like to know the cost of their policy to me.

How much of my rates go in local body cleanups of bottles from roads and walkways? How much of my ACC premiums and taxes go on stitching up children's feet after they tread on broken glass?

I would like the companies who do very nicely by selling drinks in bottles to take over a few of those costs.

I would like a refund payable on all such bottles, a refund that makes it worthwhile returning them.

A deposit of $1 on every bottle of drink - plastic or glass, soft drink or hard drink - sounds about right.

You pay the dollar when you buy the full container. You get it back when you return the empty container.

I do not believe the companies involved would instantly self-destruct. Accident, attrition and idiocy mean many bottles would not come back, so a good few dollars would clink into corporate coffers - dollars that the said corporates can use for recycling or disposing of the plastic. Their plastic, sorry.

Okay, it would mean more work for dairies and bottlestores, but they could receive a share of those unclaimed dollars.

An unworkable idea? It has been tried in a few Canadian provinces. Companies whimpered, but came round.

Picnic places, sportsground terraces and footpaths stopped being places where the next step might mean Accident and Emergency admission.

An authoritarian, rights-eroding concept? I would put our right to a filth-free environment and ungashed children's feet ahead of any right to greater business profits any day.

I see this $1 deposit as a bond that consumers pay, just like tenants in a flat. Behave yourself in the flat or the environment, leave the place as you found it by returning things in good order, and you get the bond back.

As one of the 3 million-plus landlords of our landscape, I have no qualms in asking for a bottle bond.

I am sure that beer barons and Coke kings will jump at such a public relations opportunity. They can take the lead in consumer education. They can encourage children to develop economic initiative by collecting bottles the way they used to.

Gracious me, such a scheme would develop people's working habits early, thus reducing the evil welfare burden that concerns our corporates so much.

That's my $1 worth anyway. Bottle deposits and refunds would be a great way for such companies to improve their image and our streets' image.

But only if the companies have enough bottle, of course.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.