What is your opinion of Iowa's nickel can and bottle deposit law? Do you recycle anything on a regular basis? Are these laws and procedures important to the environment or just a waste of time?
They all said that the deposit law would keep the cans out of Iowa's ditches. Well I have lived in plenty of places where there were absolutely no deposit or recycling laws whatsoever and you never saw any cans in the ditch, just dead Hispanics and hookers. The dead blacks were in dumpsters, car trunks, hotel rooms, or outside of clubs, always surrounded by non-deposit cans and bottles. I am not making this up. The nightly newscast would always begin with 10 minutes of stiffs not returning their cans. My guess is that you'll just have this without a deposit law.
Personal opinion - I liked it better when soda came in glass bottles that you returned when buying new. Seems like it tasted better back then. Might have been more sugar. Yahoo! Mountain Dew!
Anyone who has tried the new "throwback" bottles of Dew that are currently on supermerket shelves has to admit that it is a better tasting product. Made with real sugar, not fructose, it delivers a sweeter, less syrupy flavor.
Unfortunately, those of us in Iowa are forced to pay an additional nickel per bottle, or store the damn garbage until our next trip to the store.
I don't recycle, and I don't plan on beginning anytime soon. I can think of a hundred ways to keep our highways and streets clean that don't include hauling bacteria-contaminated waste into our foodstores. Leave it to Iowa to see no problem with that.
The same Iowan continues to sit around complaining about H1N1 contaminations.
I have a recycling can bag, and think its a worthwhile venture. For once I agree with anonymous on taking the nasty sh!t into a grocery store. Back when I worked at Jims, we had cockroaches and stank in the can room like no other. However since the nickel deposit was enacted back in the early 80's the redemption people were making a penny a can. Now nearly 30 years later they still make just a penny. Precisely why not many businesses can run just have redemption as a business. Any of you work for the same wage as you did then? Making it a dime would get more cans back. On the recycling note, the City of Jtown has recycling pickup. The county should have that too, create a job or two. Rural people have to haul all their recycling to town. Aside form a few tree huggers, it doesnt happen.
I remember before the recycling law was in effect. The roadsides looked awful. Everyone just chucked their cans out the window. I live on a street corner and had to pick up cans off my lawn every Sunday morning.
This law is not perfect, but nearly everyone I know now hangs on to them to get their deposit back. Our state is better-looking because of it.
Does it bother anyone else that dirty cans and bottles are being brought in to the same places where unwrapped produce and other food items are being sold and handled by the same people who handle your trash?
I like the recycling law. It lets consumers decide for themselves whether or not they choose to recycle. Those that don't pay a penalty, which has probably encouraged some to start.
Hy-Vee has a separate redemption area outside the store which keeps the cans and bottles separated from our groceries. I'm sure any ideas for improving it are welcome.
I disagree with Ms. Trailer. The current recycling law does not let consumers decide their recycling activities on their own. Like so many environmental laws, it attempts to force you to adopt that behavior by charging you fees. People who live outside of town are forced to haul their garbage into town to reclaim fees that they should not have been charged in the first place. If you want to allow consumers to decide whether to adopt recycling on their own, you would not charge everyone fees up front.
The burden of paying for the implementation of these efforts should not be borne entirely by the grocery industry (which loses money in the process), but by the consumers who think it is such a nifty idea. These same people would not be quite so enthusiastic about the law if they were required to pay dime deposits, and get nickels back.
As a representative of the grocery industry, I can tell you that the problem is not customers bringing back cans and bottles. Consumers have been doing that for 80+ years. The problem is the increased quantity of cans per customer we are being asked to redeem.
For whatever reason, customers do not return their deposits nearly as quickly as they used to. The way the law is written also encourages people to collect deposits, which they return to the stores in large, plastic bags.
A lot of people don't realize it, but stores have the right under the current law to limit the number of deposits each individual returns per day. Stores can limit customers to 600 cans per day @ 5 cents per can. After that, they can simply offer the customer a flat fee for anything over that. Virtually nobody does that, because they want to keep their customers happy.
Almost all cities in Iowa offer curbside recycling. Many of the smaller communities don't, but should. This practice makes the bottle law unnecessary.
Who wants to drive to the grocery store, and stand in line waiting while some fat slob takes his time returning 500 bottles of Black Label, when all I have is a twelve-pack? I suspect there are many like me who simply add it to my curb-side recyclables. That has worked for me for years. Just do away with the nickels(!?!) and recycle at the curb.
As anonymous above points out, people don't return their cans and bottles in a timely manner anymore. When I was a kid you bought an eight-pack of soda, and you brought your old eight-pack back. It was no hassle - you could do it right at the checkstand. Now everybody thinks they need to have a pickup bed full of cans before they take them back.
Governor Culver recently stated that he felt Iowa's can and bottle redemption program should be seen by the rest of the country as a model that should be duplicated in every state. He said that it was successful beyond all projections.
Well, I'd like to take issue with Mr. Culver and his rose-colored glasses. The only reason that this bottle bill has been "successful" is that all grocery stores in Iowa have been forced to pay for it. The implementation of this bill is zero to the state - stores are simply told that people will be bringing their redeemables in and take care of it. This means different things in different stores. At most Hy-Vee's, nearly 135% of all redeemable containers sold are returned. That's right, way more than they sell. That's because nobody takes returns back to the convenience stores where they bought them. You know why? They don't have to take them back! This has caused such an influx of garbage that almost all Hy-Vees now use those large, expensive return machines. Guess how much they cost? Over $100,000.00 each! The average consumer has absolutely no idea whatsoever how much money grocery stores pay out in equipment, repairs, labor, and insurance making sure Mr. Culver's favorite bill is implemented.
The penny-per-can that stores are reimbursed is a joke. No one in the industry hopes to even come close to breaking even under this system. It is viewed as a tax on the stores for selling a product that is in high demand among consumers. These costs are, of course, passed along to the consumer in the form of higher grocery prices.
So one must be aware that one of the main side effects this bill has demonstrated has been an increase in beverage prices. The next time you find yourself paying nearly $2.00 for a 20-oz bottle of soda, just thank the bottle bill.
Alot of people also don't realize that the state does not even care if all the deposits are brought back or not. The state makes massive amounts on unclaimed deposits each year. ifr consumers find it inconvenient, who cares?
This entire recycling thing is actually above the common man's way of thinking. Let me explain it to you. When you have finished your beer, roll down the window and toss it out onto the roadway. If you have many cans and empty bottles of scotch or wannabees sloe gin and cherry vodka, put your tailgate down and drive up a hill. Hit the brakes and see what happens. Total recycling! You are giving everything back to our Mother Earth! Beauty!
I would like to know where Diamond Dave is. Doesn't he want to talk about other people's trash and empty liquor bottles? Maybe this will get him going - I know for a fact that Noah built his ark completely out of empty Captain Morgan bottles. They used to call this gopher wood back in the day. As always, anon.
I don't think Diamond Dave recycles. Whenever I see him he just keeps walking around with the same water bottle, filling it up at the nearest tap. I think he has used it for several years now. It has mold around the lip and several gnats hovering over it.
Back in the day we used to recycle our cans, till they told us that bean and soup cans could not be returned for a deposit, which pissed us off. We were thinking that like, a can is a can, right? WTF? They would not relent, however, so we burned their place to the ground.
Taunting works. So a Hy-Vee has $600,000 sitting there big as life, making 1 penny at at time for Hy-Vee. They need around 60,000,000 cans and bottles to pay it off, ignoring labor and all other costs.
The guy who said we need to charge a dime and pay a nickel back on can deposits is spot on.
We have made unbelievable strides since the Cuyahoga River (around Cleveland) spontaneously combusted in around 1968, bcz of factories pouring their run off chemicals into the river. We're now spending billions environmentally & receiving a fraction of that in benefits.
By the way, please expound more on the Captain Morgan/gopher wood ark scenario. This is all new information to me.
Even Captain Morgan would never have built a boat out of gopherwood. That is because he wanted to make sure his craft was seaworthy. Even a small pirate craft, like a pinnace, would have been unlikely to survive one hurricane season if crafted from gopherwood.
As for all those empty bottles, if you had demanded deposits from him, presumably in pieces of eight, he would surely have had you keel-hauled.
Sir Henry Morgan was knighted after sacking Maracaibo and burning down Panama City, then the richest city in the Western Hemisphere. I can tell you, without question, that he didn't give a s#@!t what his ships were made of - he just stole them and used 'em until they sank.
He probably would be fascinated by aluminum cans. I am not sure what Henry Morgan would do with them, but my cousin, Harry Morgan, lives in Paton and takes them all back to Casey's.
I am running a $44 million interstate job here in South Carolina and $1.2 million of that is for environmental control. As you drive the 18 mile jobsite, you hear bullfrogs and stop for turtles. Streams run clear with no silt run off. Otters use their mudslides and play. Sometimes we have to saw up trees that beavers dropped into our fences. We are building an interstate highway 100 ft. away. It's out here, Dave, you just have to be here to see it.
Construction projects do not necessarily have to harm the environment. The Alaska pipeline is surrounded by animals and nature. They don't mind walking under it. It doesn't affect them. Do you ever see birds on a high line? They don't care.
Iona, good point on "valuing" clean air and water. I think its best to use cost-benefit analysis and measure the health benefits to society by figuring how many lives can be saved by spending more environmentally vs. using the money elsewhere. Ofttimes in the U.S. we spend big money to correct the last, and most expensive part, of a problem.
I believe the greatest advances environmentally were gained at the start of the movement, from 1970-1990. Great strides were made by demanding the "smoke-stack" industries make heavy investments in air cleanup, the steel industry's change to mini-mills, the de-industrializing of America, catalytic converters in cars, local regulations against open burning of leaves and trash, recycling, etc.
Marty, thanks for the specifics on the highway project and the resulting benefits.
It is necessary that we continue to fund projects aimed at reducing our "carbon footprint". Recycling is just one of many areas where we can accomplish this.
As the United States pours money into these areas, Diamond Dave needs to understand that many of the benefits we are achieving will not be noticed for quite some time. The results of this spending cannot be immediately evaluated. Many years from now the difference will become apparent.
Yes, one receives many unexpected dividends from an investment. Recycling needs to be done as efficiently as possible.
A critical asset for preserving the environment is the health of our economy. Poor economies can not afford to pour money into cleanup. Putting food on the table is priority #1. Chernobyl was left and forgotten after the nuclear accident bcz they couldn't afford to do otherwise.
The guns and butter spending policies of the 1960's are still alive and well. I believe we no longer can afford inefficient, much less, wasteful spending on whatever we want. We are subsidizing ethanol, wind and solar power heavily to reduce the carbon footprint. We would be better served to have a smaller federal gov't. and have states attempting smaller projects and find out what is a great project where our money is extremely well spent.
It looks likes you stress the benefits and I stress the costs. There must be a trade-off where both are properly factored in.
To Diamond Dave - Bcz,bcz,bcz,bcz. Use a few more keystrokes and people might take you more seriously. If those keys don't work on your keyboard, get an aircan and clean it out.
36 comments:
They all said that the deposit law would keep the cans out of Iowa's ditches. Well I have lived in plenty of places where there were absolutely no deposit or recycling laws whatsoever and you never saw any cans in the ditch, just dead Hispanics and hookers. The dead blacks were in dumpsters, car trunks, hotel rooms, or outside of clubs, always surrounded by non-deposit cans and bottles. I am not making this up. The nightly newscast would always begin with 10 minutes of stiffs not returning their cans. My guess is that you'll just have this without a deposit law.
I take that as one vote for recycling. Another great post, Big Nasty!
So, once again, I'm confused. Are the undertakers for or against can redemption?
Big, that was me.
Personal opinion - I liked it better when soda came in glass bottles that you returned when buying new. Seems like it tasted better back then. Might have been more sugar. Yahoo! Mountain Dew!
Anyone who has tried the new "throwback" bottles of Dew that are currently on supermerket shelves has to admit that it is a better tasting product. Made with real sugar, not fructose, it delivers a sweeter, less syrupy flavor.
Unfortunately, those of us in Iowa are forced to pay an additional nickel per bottle, or store the damn garbage until our next trip to the store.
I don't recycle, and I don't plan on beginning anytime soon. I can think of a hundred ways to keep our highways and streets clean that don't include hauling bacteria-contaminated waste into our foodstores. Leave it to Iowa to see no problem with that.
The same Iowan continues to sit around complaining about H1N1 contaminations.
I have a recycling can bag, and think its a worthwhile venture. For once I agree with anonymous on taking the nasty sh!t into a grocery store. Back when I worked at Jims, we had cockroaches and stank in the can room like no other. However since the nickel deposit was enacted back in the early 80's the redemption people were making a penny a can. Now nearly 30 years later they still make just a penny. Precisely why not many businesses can run just have redemption as a business. Any of you work for the same wage as you did then? Making it a dime would get more cans back.
On the recycling note, the City of Jtown has recycling pickup. The county should have that too, create a job or two. Rural people have to haul all their recycling to town. Aside form a few tree huggers, it doesnt happen.
I remember before the recycling law was in effect. The roadsides looked awful. Everyone just chucked their cans out the window. I live on a street corner and had to pick up cans off my lawn every Sunday morning.
This law is not perfect, but nearly everyone I know now hangs on to them to get their deposit back. Our state is better-looking because of it.
Does it bother anyone else that dirty cans and bottles are being brought in to the same places where unwrapped produce and other food items are being sold and handled by the same people who handle your trash?
I like the recycling law. It lets consumers decide for themselves whether or not they choose to recycle. Those that don't pay a penalty, which has probably encouraged some to start.
Hy-Vee has a separate redemption area outside the store which keeps the cans and bottles separated from our groceries. I'm sure any ideas for improving it are welcome.
I disagree with Ms. Trailer. The current recycling law does not let consumers decide their recycling activities on their own. Like so many environmental laws, it attempts to force you to adopt that behavior by charging you fees. People who live outside of town are forced to haul their garbage into town to reclaim fees that they should not have been charged in the first place. If you want to allow consumers to decide whether to adopt recycling on their own, you would not charge everyone fees up front.
The burden of paying for the implementation of these efforts should not be borne entirely by the grocery industry (which loses money in the process), but by the consumers who think it is such a nifty idea. These same people would not be quite so enthusiastic about the law if they were required to pay dime deposits, and get nickels back.
As a representative of the grocery industry, I can tell you that the problem is not customers bringing back cans and bottles. Consumers have been doing that for 80+ years. The problem is the increased quantity of cans per customer we are being asked to redeem.
For whatever reason, customers do not return their deposits nearly as quickly as they used to. The way the law is written also encourages people to collect deposits, which they return to the stores in large, plastic bags.
A lot of people don't realize it, but stores have the right under the current law to limit the number of deposits each individual returns per day. Stores can limit customers to 600 cans per day @ 5 cents per can. After that, they can simply offer the customer a flat fee for anything over that. Virtually nobody does that, because they want to keep their customers happy.
Almost all cities in Iowa offer curbside recycling. Many of the smaller communities don't, but should. This practice makes the bottle law unnecessary.
Who wants to drive to the grocery store, and stand in line waiting while some fat slob takes his time returning 500 bottles of Black Label, when all I have is a twelve-pack? I suspect there are many like me who simply add it to my curb-side recyclables. That has worked for me for years. Just do away with the nickels(!?!) and recycle at the curb.
Throwback Pepsi and Mountain Dew are available only until February 22 - enjoy it while it lasts!
As anonymous above points out, people don't return their cans and bottles in a timely manner anymore. When I was a kid you bought an eight-pack of soda, and you brought your old eight-pack back. It was no hassle - you could do it right at the checkstand. Now everybody thinks they need to have a pickup bed full of cans before they take them back.
Governor Culver recently stated that he felt Iowa's can and bottle redemption program should be seen by the rest of the country as a model that should be duplicated in every state. He said that it was successful beyond all projections.
Well, I'd like to take issue with Mr. Culver and his rose-colored glasses. The only reason that this bottle bill has been "successful" is that all grocery stores in Iowa have been forced to pay for it. The implementation of this bill is zero to the state - stores are simply told that people will be bringing their redeemables in and take care of it. This means different things in different stores. At most Hy-Vee's, nearly 135% of all redeemable containers sold are returned. That's right, way more than they sell. That's because nobody takes returns back to the convenience stores where they bought them. You know why? They don't have to take them back! This has caused such an influx of garbage that almost all Hy-Vees now use those large, expensive return machines. Guess how much they cost? Over $100,000.00 each! The average consumer has absolutely no idea whatsoever how much money grocery stores pay out in equipment, repairs, labor, and insurance making sure Mr. Culver's favorite bill is implemented.
The penny-per-can that stores are reimbursed is a joke. No one in the industry hopes to even come close to breaking even under this system. It is viewed as a tax on the stores for selling a product that is in high demand among consumers. These costs are, of course, passed along to the consumer in the form of higher grocery prices.
So one must be aware that one of the main side effects this bill has demonstrated has been an increase in beverage prices. The next time you find yourself paying nearly $2.00 for a 20-oz bottle of soda, just thank the bottle bill.
Alot of people also don't realize that the state does not even care if all the deposits are brought back or not. The state makes massive amounts on unclaimed deposits each year. ifr consumers find it inconvenient, who cares?
I thought that all unclaimed deposits went to the distributors sort of by default?
This entire recycling thing is actually above the common man's way of thinking. Let me explain it to you. When you have finished your beer, roll down the window and toss it out onto the roadway. If you have many cans and empty bottles of scotch or wannabees sloe gin and cherry vodka, put your tailgate down and drive up a hill. Hit the brakes and see what happens. Total recycling! You are giving everything back to our Mother Earth! Beauty!
I would like to know where Diamond Dave is. Doesn't he want to talk about other people's trash and empty liquor bottles? Maybe this will get him going - I know for a fact that Noah built his ark completely out of empty Captain Morgan bottles. They used to call this gopher wood back in the day. As always, anon.
I don't think Diamond Dave recycles. Whenever I see him he just keeps walking around with the same water bottle, filling it up at the nearest tap. I think he has used it for several years now. It has mold around the lip and several gnats hovering over it.
Back in the day we used to recycle our cans, till they told us that bean and soup cans could not be returned for a deposit, which pissed us off. We were thinking that like, a can is a can, right? WTF? They would not relent, however, so we burned their place to the ground.
Taunting works.
So a Hy-Vee has $600,000 sitting there big as life, making 1 penny at at time for Hy-Vee. They need around 60,000,000 cans and bottles to pay it off, ignoring labor and all other costs.
The guy who said we need to charge a dime and pay a nickel back on can deposits is spot on.
We have made unbelievable strides since the Cuyahoga River (around Cleveland) spontaneously combusted in around 1968, bcz of factories pouring their run off chemicals into the river. We're now spending billions environmentally & receiving a fraction of that in benefits.
By the way, please expound more on the Captain Morgan/gopher wood ark scenario. This is all new information to me.
Please expound more on the Captain Morgan/gopher wood ark scenario. This is all new information to me.
Uh, on 2nd thought, let's just hold off on that info. Thank you!
Even Captain Morgan would never have built a boat out of gopherwood. That is because he wanted to make sure his craft was seaworthy. Even a small pirate craft, like a pinnace, would have been unlikely to survive one hurricane season if crafted from gopherwood.
As for all those empty bottles, if you had demanded deposits from him, presumably in pieces of eight, he would surely have had you keel-hauled.
Lash the scurvy dog to the yardarm !!!
Sir Henry Morgan was knighted after sacking Maracaibo and burning down Panama City, then the richest city in the Western Hemisphere. I can tell you, without question, that he didn't give a s#@!t what his ships were made of - he just stole them and used 'em until they sank.
He probably would be fascinated by aluminum cans. I am not sure what Henry Morgan would do with them, but my cousin, Harry Morgan, lives in Paton and takes them all back to Casey's.
"We're now spending billions environmentally and receiving a fraction of that in benefits."
How do you figure that? Obviously you're not factoring clean air and water into your equation since they are worth nothing monetarily.
I am running a $44 million interstate job here in South Carolina and $1.2 million of that is for environmental control. As you drive the 18 mile jobsite, you hear bullfrogs and stop for turtles. Streams run clear with no silt run off. Otters use their mudslides and play. Sometimes we have to saw up trees that beavers dropped into our fences. We are building an interstate highway 100 ft. away. It's out here, Dave, you just have to be here to see it.
Also, we'll be out of here in 8 months and they'll have it all to themselves again if they can keep off the highway, but that's another story.
Construction projects do not necessarily have to harm the environment. The Alaska pipeline is surrounded by animals and nature. They don't mind walking under it. It doesn't affect them. Do you ever see birds on a high line? They don't care.
To Iona Trailer and Marty Bryant
Iona, good point on "valuing" clean air and water. I think its best to use cost-benefit analysis and measure the health benefits to society by figuring how many lives can be saved by spending more environmentally vs. using the money elsewhere. Ofttimes in the U.S. we spend big money to correct the last, and most expensive part, of a problem.
I believe the greatest advances environmentally were gained at the start of the movement, from 1970-1990. Great strides were made by demanding the "smoke-stack" industries make heavy investments in air cleanup, the steel industry's change to mini-mills, the de-industrializing of America, catalytic converters in cars, local regulations against open burning of leaves and trash, recycling, etc.
Marty, thanks for the specifics on the highway project and the resulting benefits.
It is necessary that we continue to fund projects aimed at reducing our "carbon footprint". Recycling is just one of many areas where we can accomplish this.
As the United States pours money into these areas, Diamond Dave needs to understand that many of the benefits we are achieving will not be noticed for quite some time. The results of this spending cannot be immediately evaluated. Many years from now the difference will become apparent.
Yes, one receives many unexpected dividends from an investment. Recycling needs to be done as efficiently as possible.
A critical asset for preserving the environment is the health of our economy. Poor economies can not afford to pour money into cleanup. Putting food on the table is priority #1. Chernobyl was left and forgotten after the nuclear accident bcz they couldn't afford to do otherwise.
The guns and butter spending policies of the 1960's are still alive and well. I believe we no longer can afford inefficient, much less, wasteful spending on whatever we want. We are subsidizing ethanol, wind and solar power heavily to reduce the carbon footprint. We would be better served to have a smaller federal gov't. and have states attempting smaller projects and find out what is a great project where our money is extremely well spent.
It looks likes you stress the benefits and I stress the costs. There must be a trade-off where both are properly factored in.
To Diamond Dave - Bcz,bcz,bcz,bcz. Use a few more keystrokes and people might take you more seriously. If those keys don't work on your keyboard, get an aircan and clean it out.
"Because because because because because - because of the wonderful things he does."
- The Wizard of Oz ,1939
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