BAN THE THROWAWAY BOTTLE & CAN!

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Can you name a quick, easy, inexpensive way to [1] clean up the nation's highways, [2] reduce the amount of garbage in the city and county dumps, [3] save billions of dollars each and every year [4] create over 100,000 new jobs, and [5] conserve more than seven million tons of glass, steel, and aluminum every 12 months...as well as enuogh energy to warm some two million American homes for an entire year? Sure...

Back in the 1940's and 50's—when a few of MOTHER's more elderly staffers were still children—you could keep yourself in chewing gum, candy, and other teeth rotters by scrounging up and redeeming empty pop and beer bottles ... which in those days had a price on their heads! For example, in 1947—when almost all soft-drink and beer containers sold were refillable—small bottles fetched 2¢ and quarts 5¢ apiece at any corner grocery or liquor store.

Pickin's weren't easy, though, because hardly anyone tossed out these treasures ... which'd just pile up on the back porch—or in the garage—until someone would finally remember to haul 'em down to the market for a refund. In other words, even those few pennies on each bottle were enough to make sure that 95 percent of the containers found their way back to the bottling plants for a refill . . . and most were used 10 to 15 times—or more!—before either loss or breakage retired them from circulation.

NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN

Bottlemakers, of course, would have preferred a slightly less durable product, but it wasn't until the late 50's that they finally managed to formulate a glass strong enough to withstand the rigors of filling and shipping once . . . but too flimsy to endure them a second time! Meanwhile, the steel industry had been successfully promoting beverage cans since the end of World War II and, by 1960, the beer can had become a firmly entrenched artifact of American life . . . a monument to "convenience" scattered abundantly along the nation's roadsides.

Even at that late date (1960), though, you could still buy almost all your soft drinks and half your beer in refillable bottles. As the 60's wore on, however, the noble returnable-for-deposit glass container steadily lost ground first to the steel—and then the aluminum—can . . . and finally, to the "twist-top, no-deposit, noreturn" bottle (which has since joined its throwaway metal counterparts along America's highways and byways by the tens of millions).

Today, a youngster trying to make a living off returnable bottles would go broke in most states . . . for about 85 percent of all the nation's beer and 62 percent of its soda pop now arrives at the store in throw aways. In 1975 alone, for example, Americans purchased 65 BILLION "one-way" bottles and cans of brew and bubble water. And the less conscientious among us tossed over four billion of those containers out somewhere alongside our roads and trails (that was half the total volume of roadside litter!). The rest of the one-way cans and bottles—about eight tons' worth—made up about 10 percent of the junk in the country's public dumps.

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