Manhattan Bridge Gettin' Jiggy With It

While a poor college student at the U of Maine back in the late 50's I would go down to the dorm TV lounge and collect bottles for deposit for spending money. The janitor was mad as it was his "cigar money". In NY a cottage industry was in operation and I'd save up all mine and cash them in every couple of weeks. Here in Florida, we just recycle.

When I was a kid and walked everywhere, my friends and I would always keep an eye on the ditch for bottles to redeem. They were worth two cents each! Those were glass bottles, though, and the store wouldn't take them if they had any chips.

My parents didn't buy soda pop, but friends' parents would get upset if someone messed with their bottles, because if you didn't bring in bottles when buying soda, you had to pay the 2 cent deposit at the grocery. And that was a lot, because the soda itself was only 4 or 5 cents each.

When I was living in Boston, MA, I was seeing those cars filled up with used cans crossing the border to (ME, NH, VT? I don't remember) to get a better refund :)
I don' t know if it's legal though.

In Alberta, nearly every beverage container requires a deposit, including milk and juice containers. All of these can be returned to a bottle depot for refunds. We see people looking through garbage cans, recyle bins, and dumpsters for empties to take back. One presumes most of them are homeless, and/or jobless. I guess it keeps the items out of the landfills (although we do have an excellent recycling/composting program in Edmonton) and provides some cash for those willing to do what it takes to recover them.
Even when I was a kid back in the 70's, we had this. We were horrified when we went to the States and saw all the glass bottles littering the highways.

My issue with deposits, is there are some things for which recycling does not achieve much useful, and wastes limited money that could be better used in other ways to help the environment. The deposit might make a slight impact on littering, but mostly ends up being a donation to a contracted company for recycling.

Some things, like aluminum, are so much easier to recycle than produce, that companies will pay for the scrap without any legal requirement. Other things like glass, take more energy, transportation, and water to recycle than to just make from scratch, while having almost no environmental impact sitting in a landfill. Deposits might be most appropriate for things that are marginally good for recycling, where a recycling company might not be willing to pay for the scrap, but there may be externalities that need to be incorporated into the cost of using the material. But instead of basing recycling on actual environmental impact, too many places use metrics that are not directly helping the environment, or worse, are doing so only to qualify for money from federal/regional government programs.

I don't think you should look at the fraction of the litter due to containers but the overall amount of litter. As it points out on page 17, there appears to be a correlation between introducing a bottle bill and the reduction of other types of litter, though the reason isn't known. I can conjecture that if you throw the can you just finished out the window then it might be easier to toss out other trash. But you are right, that isn't persuasive evidence. The strict numbers look like about an 8% reduction in litter (geometric mean of 4% and 21%, with 90% success rate at 10 cent deposit.) At this point I'm arguing the difference between "small" and "slight", so I concede.

Quoting p26, "The cost-versus-revenue bottom line for recycling programs is a hotly debated topic, due in part to whether the analysis is strictly fiscal or includes externalities such as reductions in air pollution, energy use, and environmental degradation." :)