If this means that I have to pay 10 cents per bottle only to get it back when I return it. Not going to have my support.
I already abhor our current bottle deposit laws.
I would sooner be in support of abolishing our current laws than expanding them.
It's an insane waste of time and energy that could be spent elsewhere. Going into a Meijer and having to place one can at a time into some shitty machine that half the time cannot read the bar code, taking hours out of my month I could be doing something productive and 99% of the time I lose money on it and all the cans never get recycled anyways.
All the hours of work, the electricity to run the machines, the gas and time everyone has to exert to return the cans and bottles. The space in our homes we have to dedicate to "bottle and can storage" . It's a joke.
Then try taking them back to smaller stores. 7/11 is a fucking joke. $5 minimum and each can has to be washed and dried before they will take them back? How much water are we wasting washing cans that are only going to be melted down?
Really break it down. Really think about the amount of energy we waste on this.
Thousands of bottle return machines, all using space and electricity.
Billions of square feet of heated and air condictions space storing cans in private homes.
The entire government body that oversees this program.
The gas used by 10,000,000 people to return the cans.
The Millions of hours of washing, drying, driving, waiting in line, putting the cans in the machine, waiting in the checkout line for your money, etc.
The logistics of the whole program, the trucks, the people, the hours of time and energy, that go into it.
The creation of the bottle return machines, the storage of the bottles in every store, the hours of payroll that go into the operation and maintenance of the machines.
Quantify that.
Get a real number of what that is costing society. Then take the average recycling rate of a state that has NO bottle deposit.
It's a huge undertaking, but I would bet that in the end, it's not much different.
And keep in mind I am not even talking about outliers here.
If there was no deposit, but we had a recycling program where we put cans in different bins, we would 99% with a 99% confidence level be net positive. People will recycle, and those who don't will have trash pickers helping out. And there would be more refined garbage processing centers that would extract the recyclables.
And all this is based on a premise that recycled materials are better for the environment than raw materials. Of which is not always the case. Depending on tech and the market, in some cases raw materials are actually cheaper and more environmentally friendly than recycled materials.