The ten reasons Tom Cruise is the greenest person in America

I apologize, but this article is not about Tom Cruise...it's about Tim the bottle man. Some of you may have clicked simply because of the title...baiting people into clicking on a story has a lot to do with giving them an incentive. Sometimes it's using a celebrity, sometimes the incentive is money or self-growth, and sometimes it plays to even more base desires such as sex or revenge. In any case, the incentive is what drives us.

Which brings me to Tim.

When I was growing up, Tim was a fixture in the neighborhood. We would see him roaming the alleys with his cart, collecting glass bottles from the garbage cans. At that time in Illinois, a person could turn back a bottle for a refundable deposit. Many people would go through the hassle of lugging bottles back to the store for the deposit, but many others would just throw them in the garbage. Tim took advantage of that opportunity and gathered what he could and brought them back en masse. It got to the point where some people would leave the bottles out or meet Tim in the alley to give him the bottles for that week.

Tim was an entrepreneur...because there was a market and inefficiency that needed addressing.

Flash forward to today, and a smaller number of states have refundable deposit policies in place. According to a post by Phil Sego from Sierra Club, beverage companies are going after the refundable deposit laws, ostensibly because the perceive them as a tax that inflates the cost of their product. From the point of view of supply and demand, the beverage companies have a good point: Just a small shift in price can decrease demand and hurt revenue. Even though the program has no net impact on the consumer if they return the bottle, the sticker price could prevent the customer from purchasing in the first place.

With proper recognition of the position of the beverage companies delivered, I must also note that at the same time they raise a reasonable economic concern, they completely ignore their ethical obligation...to include all the cost of the product in their expenses. The bottled beverage industry specifically - but most industries in general - push off as many expenses as possible on others in order to boost profitability. This makes sense - not from an ethical point of view, but from a profit point of view - because companies cannot charge more for a product just because it costs them more, so anything they can do to minimize costs increases profitability. In this specific instance, the companies produce the drink and the packaging, but take no responsibility for the packaging once the consumer has used it. They leave it up to the consumer and then eventually the local governments to handle the cost of the waste. Even in recycling, in areas without refundable deposit policies, the burden goes on the consumer and government.

Refundable deposit policies are effective at returning raw materials to the industrial system precisely because there is an incentive. Return the bottle and you get a reward...a tangible, financial reward. If that reward is not enough for you, then someone else will take advantage of it and find the most economically efficient way to do it. It is free-market economics at its finest. All it takes is putting the onus on the consumer to pay up front for the cost of recycling, and then getting their money back when they do. Since the bottler will not take responsibility for their product, this makes sure the consumer does something about it, or if they will not, someone steps in to do it. It also places an incentive on the manufacturer. If they want to avoid having to include the deposit in the sticker price, they can come up with a way to make the packaging so that it biodegrades naturally, or they can take over the collection of the used packaging themselves, or any number of other ways that they can use their leverage and knowledge to solve the problem.

In the end, it is the manufacturer's problem. Only they know what the value of the material is, and how best to recycle it. Consumers want their beverage product, but have little to no knowledge or incentive to make the decision to properly recycle it. As for governments, to talk out of one side of their mouth and say government intervention in business is inefficient and bad for the market, but then require government to clean up the mess is hypocritical. It is time for business to take personal responsibility for their actions.

We have already seen this in several states who have electronics recycling laws that require the manufacturer to reclaim the product and eliminate landfilling to the greatest extent possible. We have even seen beverage companies implement their own incentive programs where people get "points" for returning empties to specific stations. And we have decades of proof from the Tims of the world that even small financial incentives will work. For the last decade, we have pounded on all 316,000,000 Americans to each step up and take personal responsibility for your waste and recycle bottles and cans. It's time to take the much more efficient step of putting the responsibility where it belongs, with the manufacturers. We need a nationwide deposit system, or we need bottlers to directly manage reclamation and recycling of materials.

It would make Tom Cruise...and Tim...proud.