Recycling

When I was visiting relatives in Michigan this summer not only did everyone seem comfortable with the 10-cent deposit, but the roads were remarkably free of cans and bottles. California’s new recycling law is, unfortunately, a joke. I use three six-packs of aluminum cans a week. If I save all my cans (at some small effort) for a month, I will have accumulated about $1 worth of cans, which will cover my gas to the recycling center. I doubt that this is a real economic motivation for most California consumers.

I fear that the anti-recycling lobby will point to the failure of a plan that can hardly succeed as a reason to stop all recycling. Perhaps an effective counter would be to increase the deposit and to put all the unclaimed deposit money into a fund which would be disbursed to the stores that recycle on a yearly pro-rata basis. This would give the major objectors to the recycling law an economic motivation to support it instead.

Recycling is no longer a just an environmental issue. With Los Angeles soon to run out of available trash dump sites, recycling is needed to help keep us from drowning in our own garbage. For that matter, a national recycling law would make sense for America in terms of the environment by reducing trash and would help the economy by converting an unused national resource, our garbage, into a used national resource. It would help our trade deficit, and--oh, I’m sorry, I forgot who is in the White House. Never mind. Maybe in 1989.

RICHARD ARONSON

Los Angeles