‘Where a Nickel Pays Off’

I was dismayed to read that SB 1221 proposes to raise the redemption value of bottles and cans.

If your editorial writer had the misfortune to live in an apartment overlooking an alley (as I do) he would never have endorsed this bill. We are awakened every morning at dawn, sometimes earlier, by the first of a daylong procession of scavengers going through all the garbage cans in the alley. Twenty people a day is about average.

The sound of supermarket baskets rattling down the alley, of cans and bottles being thrown out of garbage bins as the scavengers rummage around inside the bins, and the shooting-gallery effect of cans being stamped on to flatten them are enough to drive one mad. The fact that this routine ransacking of garbage is illegal is beside the point; the law is never enforced. And now, it seems, this madness is to be intensified and abetted, if the scavengers’ monetary incentive is increased.

JILL RENTON

Santa Monica