Dan Kennedy’s post today brought to my attention a commentary piece in the Globe’s business section by Steve Bailey, calling for the end to the bottle deposit. The piece is spot on: the bottle deposit is, today at least, less about good environmental policy than surreptitious revenue for the state. This is clearer nowhere than in the city, where few stores will accept returned bottles and the supermarkets that do often offer deposits only on products sold in the store (i.e. no refund for beer or wine bottles.) Also, the sight of so many of the city’s poor scraping a living collecting cans and bottles out of recycling bins makes one wonder if the refund program and recycling programs aren’t competing for the same participants. If we are to raise a tax, it should be some form of pollution tax, a non-refundable surcharge on non-recyclable packaging, in order to give a disincentive to buy such packaging. Or at the very least to raise money to deal with the environmental consequences of our immense generation of trash.
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