IF THEY CAN, THEY’LL CAN THE CANS

My home state of Iowa was one of the first states in the union to institute a mandatory five-cent deposit on soda and beer sold in cans and bottles, all the way back in 1978. The state law mandates that any grocer who sells beverages must accept the used containers. (The state pays grocers 1 cent for every beverage container they turn over to be recycled.)

Grocers were never in love with the process, and for good reason. Processing returns is time-consuming, a penny per can is a lot less money now than it was 26 years ago, and frankly, you have to wonder if some of the cans people turn in for recycling were fished out of the manure pits on hog lots. If I ran a grocery store, I don’t think I’d be too thrilled about taking back cans full of backwash and cigarette butts, forcing my employees to handle them, and then having to find a place to store them–that’s space I could use to store additional items I could sell, after all.

So it’s not surprising that grocers have been trying to deep-six the law since it was enacted. There has always been a provision allowing stores to designate an off-site redemption center to handle their returns, so long as (a) it’s reasonably close to the store, and (b) it meets certain hours-of-business criteria. But, for the most part, stores haven’t pulled the trigger on this idea.

Until now.

Iowa’s largest grocery store chain has begun taking steps to rid its stores of empty bottles and cans that grocers have long complained are unsanitary and a risk to food safety.

Hy-Vee Food Stores spokeswoman Ruth Mitchell said Tuesday the chain’s 103 Iowa supermarkets are looking at no longer accepting empty beer and soda cans, and instead having customers go to a redemption center to claim their 5-cent deposit.

This is big–Hy-Vee (which many readers will recognize as the former employer of Kurt Warner, and which many New York Giants fans probably wish was Mr. Warner’s current employer) is the only grocery store in many smaller Iowa towns, and the state’s second-largest chain, Fareway, has already said it plans to stop accepting cans and bottles.

The grocers have a point. While the overwhelming majority of Iowans rinse their cans and bottles before returning them, it only takes a few slobs to establish a bacteria colony the size of Greenland. It’s not about the money–as the article points out, the grocers can always raise their price. It’s more about sanitation; bacterial outbreaks can be fatal to food-service establishments, even grocery stores.

It’s time for Iowa to reconsider the Bottle Bill. What made sense twenty-six years ago is not so self-evident now. Many communities already have curbside recycling for glass and plastic containers; it wouldn’t be so hard to add aluminum cans to the mix as well. Likewise, the law has failed to keep pace with the times. It only covers alcoholic beverage and soda containers; no deposit is required on juice, water, or “New Age” beverage containers.

Personally, I think the whole thing should be scrapped. The original purpose of the Bottle Bill was to cut down on litter. I now live in Wisconsin, where there’s no deposit on beverage containers, and our ditches, while not pristine, aren’t overflowing with beer cans–and you’d figure that if that would happen anyplace, it’d be here. Knock off the nickel-back and let the market clean the ditches instead.