In the 1980s, there was a conflict raging about recycling. Governments were starting to do it while states that had a 'bottle bill' - a deposit on bottles you got refunded upon return - wanted to keep their success.

Some environmental groups, like Public Interest Research Group, supported state bottle bills over expensive government recycling - that's right, an environmental group that didn't want more centralized control. They believed the private sector would continue to do it better and cheaper. They were right but government unions won. Today, California's 7th largest export is garbage while the state has created the appearance of 'success' by mandating that everything from plastic milk containers to greasy pizza boxes goes into blue bins, even though everyone with entry-level knowledge of the process knows the environmental cost to recycle most things is a very expensive environmental negative.

Which means they aren't recycled. It is instead in landfills, often in China, where gullible voters pretend it will ever be recycled. At obscenely high cost.

Even in states that still have bottle bills, like British Columbia, recycling has declined, and that is due to inflation. In past days, people kept a tremendous number of bottles but many wouldn't turn them in, so groups like the Boy Scouts would have fundraising drives to take your bottles to recycling. The environment won, consumers won, the Boy Scouts won, etc. Today, 10 cents isn't what it used to be. Government stimulus plans, runaway hiring, and printing off money to pay for all of that increased debt means inflation is 212% of what it was in the 1980s. A group of scholars wants to give bottle deposits a monetary boost in the the modern economy by embracing what Norway does to keep recycling high. Using a lottery.



Writing in "Probabilistic refunds increase beverage container recycling behaviour in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada", Radke et al. recounted two experiments where participants chose a 10-cent refund or a 1 in 10,000 to win a larger amount , from $1 to $1,000, while in a third experiment participation in the groups was randomized.

Recycling of bottles went up 47%. So did "anticipatory" happiness. People were also a lot happier about gambling than they were just getting a dime.

Canada has 800% of the Norway population so vending machines where people can return bottles and get money or a lottery entry would be an expensive proposition. In the U.S. the costs would be even more onerous.

Still, recycling using the private sector is a better idea than government pretending it works. The private sector knows what can be recycled, and we'd have saved a trillion dollars in shipping garbage if we had listened.