i saved up all the beer bottles from the deep-fry party so i could return them and get the deposits back. So this morning I looked on line to find out where to take them, and couldn’t find anything. I looked up Whole Foods, figuring they’re all crunchy-granola and will undoubtedly take them, and nothing. So I called them up, and they acted all confused, and put me on hold to go find an eco-focused dude in the beer department — at which point the lightbulb went on and I went to check the labels on the bottles, and lo, ILLINOIS DOESN’T HAVE A BOTTLE BILL.
DUH.
It never occurred to me that a place wouldn’t have a bottle bill, even though for 35 years I’ve been reading the list on bottle labels of the tiny handful of states that DO have them. Oy — you can take the girl out of the east coast, but you can’t take the east coast out of the girl, at least not so easily. Dang. Now I have to put them all in the trash, bah.
i read an article about this a few years back; some kids in college couldn’t get their head around this and would go to such extreme measures as keeping all their bottles, and bringing them back with them when they’d drive home, or drive to michigan (i think that’s the closest state with a bottle law); one kid even brought home a couple bottles in his handcarry over the holidays. where i live in los angeles doesn’t have any curbside recycling programs, so i (shhhhhhh) drive to nearby beverly hills and drop off my recyclables in the giant recycling tubs found in the bh alleys.
Whenever my houseguests ask me where to put their empty bottles, I tell them that the recycling program in Chicago is a farce, and they get really mad at me. I feel just awful about it, but I am not going to blue-bag things when I know they are just going to be compacted in the garbage truck with the rest of the garbage (I see it all the time when I am stuck behind garbage trucks) and taken to the dump. I am shocked that the general public has not put more pressure on the mayor and forced him to get something done about our embarrassing recylcing non-program.