Sycamore Greenway Friends: If you build it, will they come?

If you notice litter around town, or take a gander at some drainage areas (like the Sycamore Greenway) in winter once the greenery dies back, you know litter is a problem.

If you look closely, you know much of that litter is made up of beverage containers: beer cans, pop cans and bottles, water bottles, energy drink cans, sports drink bottles. And if you've followed this page for any length of time, you know that Iowa's Bottle Bill can be an incredibly effective mechanism to prevent exactly this type of litter...if only it would be strengthened and expanded.

While we wait patiently for the legislature to get its act together, we limp along with the Bottle Bill we have. Fortunately, we have a great resource here on the south side of town that is making it even easier to return your deposit containers.

The Can Shed celebrated the opening of a new location last week, and invited the public to see the facility. Beyond the cheerful murals celebrating closed-loop systems and depicting our fine city was a magical room filled with the most amazing Rube-Goldberg contraptions to process a jumbled mix of plastic and aluminum, from any number of distributors quickly and efficiently into compact bins of material ready to be shipped off for recycling.

They have simplified the process: where once redeeming containers was a laborious practice of feeding individual cans or bottles into a machine one at a time, or else carefully saving enough containers of the same type to fill a large bag—you can now bring your bin full of mixed items, dump them in a receptacle, push a button, and the magic machine does it work to count, separate deposit items from non-deposit items, and separate the containers by material type within minutes. You get a ticket with the quantity redeemed, and trade it for cash.

(Sound down for these videos...they are NOISY!)

Another innovation is their Bottle Drop program. With the help of an app and individually QR-coded bags, you can drop your mixed containers off through a drop door and have the funds credited to your account. While offering maximum convenience, there are additional costs (you must purchase the bags at a cost of 10 for $2.10, and additional fees per bag and for the electronic fund transfers).

Is this a paid ad for the Can Shed? No, this is all gratis. We need a better Bottle Bill, and to do that we need facilities like this to show how simple it can be to make it work for everyone. (Plus the equipment was super-fun to watch and everyone should be able to enjoy it.)

What can you do?

Redeem your deposit cans and bottles! Even if you don't think the nickel is worth your time, every can or bottle that leaves the system is a nickel the bottle distributors get to keep. Iowa's redemption rate is abysmal compared to states with better bottle bills, in part because our lawmakers have not been invested in seeing it succeed. In addition, single-stream municipal recycling is far less efficient than the dedicated material recycling that comes with these redemptions.
Spread the word! Share how important the Bottle Bill is to keeping our state beautiful.
Tell your state legislators in Des Moines that we need a better Bottle Bill: it needs to be expanded to include water bottles, sports drinks, and other beverage containers, and the deposit needs to be increased to $.10 (it should be a quarter, if it had kept up with inflation since 1978, but let's compromise down to a dime).