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I'm a 30 year old Engineer. I used to get excited about recycling bottles when I was a kid because of the cash you can rake in. Now as my income has increased there is less of an incentive for me to recycle bottles at the store. I also find that because I don't drink much soda my bottles typically just go out with the curb side recycling at a loss of about 40 cents a month.

I have three major problems with today's system:

1. The cash back of 5 cents just isn't very much incentive when bottles from vending machines are costing upwards of a $1.35+. I would suggest 15-25 cent deposits on soda pop. Not only would more people recycle the ones they buy, just about anyone would pick one off the street and recycle it.

2. The Machines break down, fill up, and take too long to process a bottle. A better machine would be like that of the automatic coin sorter that they have at banks. You dump you coins in and in less then a minute 300 coins are sorted. If they had a machine that was this fast, more people would use it.

3. Stores and Machines linked to stores typically don't take bottles from different retailers. I typically buy bottles from Fred Meyer, Trader Joes, and Safeway. I wind up leaving about half of them behind when I go to one store to sort them all. It is too much storage to create separate bins for each retailer.

-Jeff

posted 4 years, 11 months ago
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