The Bottle Bill Is Broken

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When I first moved here nearly two and a half decades ago I was delighted that Oregon had a bottle bill.  Having come from a state where bottles and cans were routinely thrown in the trash; this state was the leader in forward thinking.  Back then one would take their bottles to the grocery store and a bottle clerk would count what you brought in and give you a slip to be cashed in at the register.
 Several years ago the process became automated and hulking machines were brought in to count your cans and bottles.  The problem is these machines are operating in a sticky environment and they break down often, so no sooner than a clerk clear and reset a machine and starts walking back to the store another machine jams.
I live on a back road where people who want to drink while driving will use the route by my house to imbibe and in an effort to destroy any evidence they toss their cans and bottles out the window rather than risk being caught by the police with an empty container on board.  It’s their five-cent insurance premium.  There are folks that walk the road occasionally and pick up the cans and bottles, but as I ride my horse down the road I’ve calculated that there is often around $3.00 of containers per mile.
I went to Fred Meyer last night with a large accumulation and I had to wait for three jams to be cleared for the two people in front of me before I was even able to step up and jam the machine four times myself.  The other bottle machine was broken.  I finished most of the glass bottles I had and all of the cans in the bulk machine.  I still had plastic bottles in the truck as it was getting dark.  I had enough so I gave the remainder of the bottles to a pensioner who came with more returns than I had.
This makes me question if people are really disposing of their cans and bottles on the road because they don’t want to be caught with them, or if it just isn’t worth the five-cents to deal with the aggravation of turning them in.  I thought that once water and juice bottles were added to the bottle bill the state was going to create return centers where that all that was done, accepting returns. 
The bottle bill was set up to prevent litter, and that doesn’t seem to be working.  I wonder how Washington roads look.  They don’t have a bottle bill and I don’t think they have a problem.  Folks in Washington are avid recyclers.  It would be much easier if we could drop the five-cent deposit and trust us to recycle.