As the debate around strategies to recover beverage containers heats up again, so too does the interest in quality information. For readers interested in said illumination, Who Pays What 2010 (the fourth edition) fills the bill, as it houses everything one needs to know about beverage container recovery in Canada. While some might choose to disregard the remarkable success that Canadians have had with beverage container recovery because of our small population, it shoud not be so quickly sloughed off. Even with its tiny population – and just one-ninth the density of the U.S. – beverage container reuse and recycling in Canada is a real success story. Who Pays What 2010 tells a compelling story of innovative programs with low costs, high performance and funding provided by industry and/or consumers, not municipalities or taxpayers. The economies of scale in the U.S. provide many opportunities for a possible state-based, or even a national program, that have the potential to be not only inexpensive, but to be highly successful. And in the wake of that success, such programs would attract domestic markets and incentivize new domestic recycling capacity for glass and plastics specifically, while simultaneously reducing contamination to paper streams.
