Friday, March 26, 2010

The Nickel Deposit

The other day I was out on the W&OD trail for a six mile walk. I started at the 23.5 marker at Dominion Station in Sterling and headed east. The sky was clear and the air a bit warm and I took it a bit slow. Nothing much was on my mind except getting the miles in and keeping the weight off -- I'd had a few chocolate bars the previous days, breaking my two per week target. But if you don't eat chocolate, why live, right?

I dashed across Sterling Blvd ahead of cars going way to fast. When I slowed at the little rise on the other side I saw the empty plastic water bottle. A few yards down the trail I saw another one. And another one. Then a energy drink can and a Gatorade bottle.
The trail of them kept going. I started to count them and think back to when I was a kid, probably 10 or 11 years old. In New York back in the 1970s the city government had instituted a five cent deposit on bottles and cans. Turn the stuff in and you got a nickel each. Turn in twenty bottles and cans and a kid whose allowance was just 35 cents a week could walk away with a dollar. Turn in more, and earn more.

Guess what I did. I hunted bottles and cans with a friend of mine like crazy. And not just me; a whole bunch of people collected bottles and cans for the deposit and you know what? The streets of Staten Island (the part of NYC where I lived) didn't have too many cans or bottles in the gutters and bushes. Like the ol' prospector Yosemite Sam told Bugs Bunny: "There's gold in them thar hills." Gold for me was a pile of Coke and Pepsi cans and soda bottles.

There's no deposit on bottles and cans in Virginia, D.C. or in Maryland. For a quick review of why check out this column by Marc Fisher in The Washington Post.
A couple of summers ago, I was vacationing with my family in Ocean City, MD. I had a great time in the water, on the beach and the boardwalk. I don't know how many water bottles and beer cans I picked up on the beach that day and carried the endless distance of about 40 feet to the blue barrel trash cans, but I carried more than one. I wonder if a deposit law was in effect in Maryland that fewer bottles and cans would be on the beach, and in the ocean.



I also remember seeing a few guys who looked homeless while in Ocean City. Where they stayed is anyone's guess. How they survived is also anyone's guess. I'm pretty sure that if Maryland had a bottle deposit law that these guys would have combed the beach like a kid looking for the perfect shell. We'd have had a cleaner beach and a healthier ocean.

Five cents each. How much could it be? That brings me back to the W&OD. I counted 215 bottles and cans on my six mile round trip. That would be $10.75. If I were 12 years old in 1974 that would have been enough money for practically a summer's worth of chocolate milk shakes, a few movies -- something, a lot of somethings.

Or for a person without income, living on the street, panhandling for money for food, $10.75 would buy a pretty long list of groceries:

1 pound box of spaghetti -- $1.00
1 pound of bread (generic) $1.49
4 cans of tuna fish $4.00
1 gallon of milk 3.29
1 Hershey bar (Wal-Mart) 50 cents

Quite a nutritious shopping list (candy bar notwithstanding, but hey, it's chocolate) from a nickel deposit.

Not to mention the increased beauty of the W&OD, the Ocean City beach, and just about every other place we'd like to keep nice.