No Deposit, No Return

Prior to about 1965, when you bought a bottle of soda pop, beer, or whatever, the price included a deposit

for the bottle.  The bottles were made of fairly thick glass.  You'd return the bottle to the store and they'd return the deposit and collect the bottles in the same wooden or wire trays they'd been delivered in.  The delivery truck from the bottling company would pick up the tray, and the bottles would be washed, sterilized and refilled.  Many of the companies had an agreement that they'd use interchangeable bottles...most beer, for example, came in a familiar brown bottle that was identical, no matter which American brewery had produced it.    I got to take a tour of one of these plants and the washing process was very interesting and impressive, and a big part of the bottling process.

Around 1965, somebody came up with the bright idea to make bottles that used a lot less material.  Initially they were still glass, but they were much thinner.  This reduced the weight to be delivered, and eliminated the washing process for the bottler, as well as giving consumers a small price break.  It was promoted as "No Deposit, No Return."  Most people did the suggested right thing and threw it into the trash, but plenty did not, and there was an immediate and shocking increase in litter--in parks, in parking lots, by the side of the road.  By 1970, a lot of people were realizing a mistake had been made.  The growing realization of the limits of the earth and it's resources added to this--which got a big boost from the 1968 Christmas visit to the moon by Apollo 8.

It took a while, but many states now force vendors to recycle again.  New technologies have been developed:  Instead of being washed, the glass bottles are now sorted by color, crushed, melted and made into new bottles.  Plastic is sorted by type and a few types are melted and turned into new bottles, although most is turned into non-food-safe objects.  One of my favorites is polar fleece.  Cans in the 1960s had been steel, and to drink a beer or soda pop you needed a can or bottle opener.  The "pull tab" was invented about the same time as No Deposit and immediately millions of pull tabs began filling the landscape, as well as being accidentally consumed by animals, and a few people.  The aluminum can came along at about the same time as the non-separating pull tab, fairly late in the 1970s.  Aluminum is extremely easy to recycle (it floats on top of other metals when melted) and a design that used very little was soon developed.   If you were born after about 1963, you probably never knew anything else.