Moments after posting today’s Bigger Better Bottle Bill piece (see below), I received an email alert from the NY Times that contained, serendipitously… an article about bottle bills past, present and future. The perfect companion to my previous post!
The bottle bill’s scope, and to some extent the very vision of a more waste-conscious world that first motivated it, has been swiftly trivialized by the ubiquity of bottled water. This year, Americans will drink more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water. Oregonians will throw out about 170 million empty ones. Those same bottles, filled with something fizzy, would carry nickel deposits. “That was the stupidest thing we ever did,” says a veteran of the original Oregon campaign.
Read the whole story here (it’s long!).
