Lenny of Onward Oregon has piece on the bottle bill expansion over at Blue Oregon that has prompted some good comments:

http://www.blueoregon.com/2007/04/bottle_bill_sym.html#comments

The most insightful point made is that the incentives for the grocers are to make the system bad enough that people just discard their empties rather than deal with the hassle of one-at-a-time-painfully-slow-while-you-stand-in-the-rain machines that frequently break down or, as happened to me yesterday, reject a particular color label (but accept the other identical brand sodas from the same case) for no apparent reason at all.

Every time you say “ah, screw it, I’ll just put it in the trash,” the grocers—the people working overtime to put solid waste into the environment and to evade responsibility for dealing with it—pocket another nickel. In other words, the worse the system gets, the more they get to keep.

Now I don’t think the bottle bill is nearly as important as the e-waste bill that I’ve blogged about earlier, but the principle is huge: anyone who wants to move Oregon Onward toward a better future has got to understand systems design and the use of feedback, and how people respond to the actual incentives they feel rather than to what they maybe ought to feel. Any policies we design to improve Oregon have to recognize “the folly of hoping for A while rewarding B.”

Right now, grocers are rewarded for B (making bottle recycling hard and ineffective) while we’re all hoping for A (a comprehensive response to the throwaway society). Folly.

If you are moved to take action on the bottle bill, check the “Take Action” link above at this site. (But please read about the E-waste bill [HB 2626] and support that on your own; I can’t seem to get that added to the Take Action listing.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 8:40 am and is filed under Environment, General, Livability, Take Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.