Wednesday, October 7, 2009

With apologies to Robert Fulghum . . .


. . . all you really need to know about the bottle bill you can learn at the recycling plant. And what you'll learn is that people prefer the ease and convenience of curbside recycling rather than the bottle-bill system.

This is a picture of a bale of aluminum cans waiting to be shipped from CRRA's regional recycling facility in Hartford to a processor which will turn them into new products. Highlighted are cans which could have been returned for redemption but weren't. Why? Obviously, we couldn't track down each consumer, but it's not hard to surmise that people would rather place these and other deposit bottles and cans in their curbside bins than save them in their basement or garage or kitchen and make a special trip to the supermarket or redemption center to get their nickels back.

In this case, one picture really is worth a thousand words. Or, more to the point, a thousand nickels.