5 cents a bottle

For two days in a row now I've seen discarded chicken bones on the sidewalk during my train-work walk. It made me miss St. Louis and reaffirmed my belief that peoples is people. I suspect the circumstances by which bones come to rest in the street are different in STL vs. Boston, however. In STL, I think people just throw them out their car windows. I think in Boston it is because we pay a deposit on cans and bottles. Every garbage day the city streets are literally littered with litter because a horde of entrepreneurs tear apart peoples' trash bags to fish out the discarded cans and bottles (5 cent deposit on each). It's sad and annoying. In STL, we saved our smelly bottles and cans and less smelly cardboard and hauled them down to some bins several blocks from our house every few weeks. When we moved here, we were excited that we had curbside recycling so we wouldn't have to keep the stuff in our living area or leave the house to arrow triangle. Turns out we do unless we want the government to steal our nickels. It's a super lame system. Most grocery and liquor stores have machines where you can (one at a time) load in your cans and bottles and it spits out a receipt. The problem is that most liquor stores won't take bottles for beers they don't sell. If you have eclectic taste in beer, you may have to visit 3 different stores to get your money back, which is super uncool. Also, liquor stores only take beer cans, so I can't recoup my Diet Coke losses without a separate trip. And finally, if anything happens to your bar codes or your cans get slightly crushed, SOL. I guess I could just come to terms with losing a few bucks a month and quit whining, but it's the principle dammit! What's more, there was a recent newspaper article saying the state loses 12 million dollars a year on people bringing their bottles, Neumann and Kramer style, across state lines to collect our hard earned nickles. Outrageous. I know the point of deposits is to reduce waste, and it works (see hordes of human raccoons making sure nothing worth 5 cents makes it to a landfill), but why do you have curbside recycling then!? To tease us? To make me feel like a cheap loser for not wanting to throw away change? For paper recycling? (Shut up, brain)