Terms Which Have Disappeared

[LizzieMaine]

Around here, you often see the slogan "Don't Mess With Texas" on signs, bumper stickers, tshirts, etc. Many people assume that some sort of declaration of swagger, but it's the slogan for TxDOT's anti-littering campaign. The campaign is credited with drastically reducing littering, and it's become quite the catch phrase. Perhaps not everything from the Boys From Marketing is a bad thing.

What did the trick here was the Bottle Deposit Law we passed in 1976. Nearly all beverage containers sold in Maine have to carry a refundable deposit -- that's not just soda and beer, but also water, juice, tea, sports drinks, wine, and liquor. The only exception is milk bottles, jugs, and cartons. Within a year of that law being implemented in 1978, the majority of roadside trash was gone. The Boys have been trying to get that law repealed for almost forty years now, but they never succeed. We *like* it, and we're going to keep it.

Now if we could get a deposit law for sneakers, mattresses, baby carriages, and cheap furniture, we'd get rid of the rest of the roadside trash.

 

[Fading Fast]

In NYC the bottle deposit law plays out in an interesting way. Most New Yorkers - being direct - all but the most destitute throw the bottles away. Then, and you can see this happen - it's actually a very efficient process - and army of very poor / homeless people collect the bottles from the garbage (both the public cans and the private trash put out by the buildings). You'll then see them bring, literally, thousands of bottles back to the stores for the deposits.

From a keep the city clean, recycle and provide revenue to the needy (in return for very unpleasant work), the deposit program works, but probably not as it was imagined.

I often wonder as a pragmatic environmentalist, if all the separating of garbage - three or four cans - separate trucks picking different types of garbage up, etc. (I lived across the street from one building that had three separate pickups - "regular trash," "plastics" and "paper" - and the extra energy and cost these programs and efforts incur is weighed against the environmental good)?

I am not arguing - sincerely - that we return to either polluting or intentionally waste (I love how much cleaner our environment is versus the '70s and am glad to pay more taxes to have it so), I just wonder if the way we do it now truly makes sense. How much plastic is wasted in all those extra garbage cans? How much fuel is burned by all those extra truck? How much public revenue is spent that could go to other social programs? I have no idea - and maybe it all makes senses - but when I see so much additional effort and resources, I at least wonder if the cost-benefit was really thought through. If it was - that's great - and I'll fully support it. It truly is just a thought that sits in the back of my head when I see all that is involved in NYC's recycling program.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I often wonder as a pragmatic environmentalist, if all the separating of garbage - three or four cans - separate trucks picking different types of garbage up, etc. (I lived across the street from one building that had three separate pickups - "regular trash," "plastics" and "paper" - and the extra energy and cost these programs and efforts incur is weighed against the environmental good?

We have sort of that now. We have "recyclable" cans and those are picked up by a specific truck on a specific day. Regular trash is picked up separately. I assumed this was pretty common, but perhaps not.

I am not arguing - sincerely - that we return to either polluting or intentionally waste (I love how much cleaner our environment is versus the '70s and am glad to pay more taxes to have it so), I just wonder if the way we do it now truly makes sense. How much plastic is wasted in all those extra garbage cans? How much fuel is burned by all those extra truck? How much public revenue is spent that could go to other social programs? I have no idea - and maybe it all makes senses - but when I see so much additional effort and resources, I at least wonder if the cost-benefit was really thought through. If it was - that's great - and I'll fully support it. It truly is just a thought that sits in the back of my head when I see all that is involved in NYC's recycling program.

Net Environmental Benefit Analysis (NEBA). A formal process for this was developed for responding to oil spills, but the process is used for all sorts of environmental decision making. It's not exactly embraced by everyone though.

 

[tonyb]

Scavengers are found almost everywhere. The most lucrative of the commonly scavenged swag is aluminum. And in most places of which I am aware there are ordinances against taking the aluminum out of private recycling containers (those at residences and businesses), this on account of the aluminum being the only recycled material that actually nets a profit.

Paper and glass and plastic gets sold, but at a price that doesn't cover the cost of processing it. Still, getting *some* money for it beats putting it in a landfill.

Ordinance or no, scavengers are seen taking the aluminum cans from residential recycling bins.

Why anyone would object to people taking aluminum from public waste receptacles, aluminum which would otherwise end up in a landfill, is a mystery to me. (Provided, of course, that the scavenger doesn't leave trash that had been in the receptacle littered all around it.)

 

[LizzieMaine]

In NYC the bottle deposit law plays out in an interesting way. Most New Yorkers - being direct - all but the most destitute throw the bottles away. Then, and you can see this happen - it's actually a very efficient process - and army of very poor / homeless people collect the bottles from the garbage (both the public cans and the private trash put out by the buildings). You'll then see them bring, literally, thousands of bottles back to the stores for the deposits.

It's different here -- Mainers are very careful with a dollar, and even a nickel. Those born here have it inculcated in them from birth, and those who move here pick it up PDQ, because money is not easy to come by, no matter how hard you work or what you do for a living. The culture shock for from-aways is often quite harsh when they realize they're going to be living on a fraction of what they're used to in The Big City. You go to the redemption centers and you see lobstermen with loads of beer bottles, housewives with soda bottles and the occasional Allen's Coffee Brandy, and transplants with their chardonnay bottles, but you see them all there. Nobody's too good to cash in bottles in Maine.

We do have gleaners, but they have to work very hard for what they glean -- there are rarely bottles in the trash cans except in the summer, when tourists who don't know the deal throw them away.

My only gripe with the Bottle Law is that it didn't mandate refillables. For the first ten years or so, traditional refillables were the most common soda and beer bottles, but after Coke and Pepsi liquidated their local bottlers in the late '80s, the shift came to plastic. Environmental considerations aside, plastic bottles are an inferior product.

 

[tonyb]

What's the cost/benefit to refillables?

I suspect there are also product liability concerns. You know, the potential for a chipped opening on a glass bottle cutting a person.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The cost savings exist if your product is being bottled locally -- in the Era, soda was bottled by locally franchised plants and distributed in defined regions. Under this system it was beneficial to use refillable bottles -- they could be refilled and reused for decades, obviating the need for new packaging every time. We sold Coke in 6 1/2 ounce glass bottles in our machine at the gas station, and it was common, in the late '70s, to get bottles made in the 1940s. They really were that durable. Nobody, to my memory, ever complained about this -- it was accepted as a normal part of the system.

There were other benefits to that local system -- local jobs, local profits staying in the community, locally-focused service for retailers handling the product. But when Big Soda moved to eliminate local franchises in favor of huge regional bottling plants set up to service huge supermarket-oriented accounts, all these benefits were lost. The individual consumer might save a few cents on his bottle of bellywash from Super Wal Mart, but the community as a whole takes a loss. It wasn't a matter of consumer choice, either -- one day in 1988 we went to the store and the refillable bottles were gone, boom, simple as that. We, as consumers, had no say in the matter.

 

[Paisley]

It used to be common to use jail inmates for that kind of cleanup work -- work crews in the North, chain gangs in the South.

They still do in Indiana. In nicer areas, though, volunteers pick up trash every few months. "Trash" around here includes things like old tires and furniture. I even picked up a toilet septic tank and an old stroller during cleanups. The city hauls that stuff away for free--I don't know why more people don't just set that stuff out on monthly trash days when the city picks up large items.

My home state of Colorado got serious about litter a long time ago. There's no deposit on bottles, but there's a big fine for littering: $500 per piece, up to $1,000 for two or more pieces of trash. "Trash" includes pieces of paper. A classmate of mine got a $500 fine for throwing two pieces of paper out his car window (the going rate at the time) and my father saw a cop tell a woman, who'd emptied her ashtray in a parking lot, to clean up the mess or get a ticket. As a result, Denver's a very clean city. Indiana has similar fines, but the police here are so busy with serious crimes that the Indianapolis police refer littering to code enforcement.

 

[LizzieMaine]

When I'm dictator it'll be a $500,000 fine and a trip to the reeducation colony for flicking a lit cigarette butt out a car window. I've had these blow into my own car and nearly set me on fire.

 

[Paisley]

Flicking a lit cigarette butt out the window in arid places like Colorado can start a brush or forest fire. In that state, it's a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1,000 fine, 12 months in jail and community service.

 

[Fading Fast]

Flicking a lit cigarette butt out the window in arid places like Colorado can start a brush or forest fire. In that state, it's a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1,000 fine, 12 months in jail and community service.

Good - sounds reasonable to me.

Have you ever seen an old movie or TV show where an actor rubs his cigarette butt out on carpet - I see it from time to time and am amazed that it was every acceptable. It was in a TCM move - maybe "Reunion in France" (not sure) - I saw recently - crazy.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^
As I already confessed, I have tossed burning cigarette butts out of car windows on thousands of occasions. Such was once common and acceptable behavior. We smoked in stores and restaurants and in college classrooms, and often used the floors as our ashtrays.

It took a few decades of relentless anti-smoking efforts to turn that around. But turn around it did, such that now we are left shaking our heads at our own behavior of not so long ago.

 

[Paisley]

Good - sounds reasonable to me.

Have you ever seen an old movie or TV show where an actor rubs his cigarette butt out on carpet - I see it from time to time and am amazed that it was every acceptable. It was in a TCM move - maybe "Reunion in France" (not sure) - I saw recently - crazy.

Were they in a flophouse?

I saw it on Designing Women. Julia (the owner of the house) was apoplectic.

A plaque from my parents' home: "If you are smoking, you had better be on fire."

 

[2jakes]

Have you ever seen an old movie or TV show where an actor rubs his cigarette butt out on carpet - I see it from time to time and am amazed that it was every acceptable. It was in a TCM move ...

I noticed that most WW2 films made in the 40s where a soldier or sailor is wounded
in combat, the reward is a smoke.
And the cigarettes do not have filters.

At one time smoking was permitted in the rear of public buses & in restaurants.
Then it was switched to “smoking section only”.

And now the only smoking done is when I start to fume by the
poor service in some public places.

 

[Stanley Doble]

In movies I have seen them drop an ash on the carpet and rub it in with a shoe but not a cigarette butt. Same in old books.

 

[Fading Fast]

In movies I have seen them drop an ash on the carpet and rub it in with a shoe but not a cigarette butt. Same in old books.

Maybe the logic there was fire prevention from an accidental dropping of an ash. But I know I've seen, in movies, actors intentionally drop a butt to the ground and rub it out with their shoe, indoors on what looks like carpet. I grew up for about the first 10 years with a smoker (finally, he quit), but that was not something anyone would ever do.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think that might be Hollywood shorthand for showing the audience that the character who does such an act is an arrogant jackass.

Cigarette smoking was never as universal as people remember it -- it peaked at just under 50 percent of the adult US population in 1965. But among certain demographic groups it was much higher. Men who served in either World War I or World War II were consistently more likely to be smokers than any other segment of the population, and this was largely the result of cigarettes being issued as part of the regular ration. Big Tobacco went out of its way to ensure that this was the case -- millions of men entered the military as non-smokers and emerged as tobacco addicts, and they formed the bulk of the industry's customer base for much of the 20th Century.

Big Tobacco was careful to look after these customers even after they got out of the service. In the 1950s and 1960s it was very common for tobacco companies that sponsored baseball broadcasts to award cartons of cigarettes to veterans hospitals for every home-team home run hit. "That's a home run for Hodges -- and another ten thousand Luckies to the VA hospital on Staten Island!"

 

[Trenchfriend]

In Germany of today, tobacco processing industry has no strong lobby and so, it's former great meaning is fading away, permanently. Smoking cigarettes is not more "normal", here.

 

[Fading Fast]

Smokers being 50% or even less sounds right to me as in the 60s, when I think about my family and friends (parents, that is), definitely less than 50% smoked.

That said, the cultural norm (at least in NJ in the '60s into the '70s) was smokers' rights rule and smokers felt entitled to smoke almost anywhere and were resentful if restricted. That wheel has turned a full 180 degrees today and, looking back, you can see that it took about thirty years for that turn to happen.

Not only did laws have to change - like, in NYC, no smoking allowed in restaurants and bars - but cultural norms had to change (remember the insanity of smoking sections on airplanes - as if the air in a sealed tube knew to stop at a certain row number). Other than the occasional jerk, most smokers are aware of the cultural environment and try to smoke with respect for others (but, not always, as noted, there are always a few the-world-revolves-around-me people).

No other point than that it is interesting from a social / cultural perspective to have lived through such a big change in norms.

 

[Paisley]

My employer doesn't allow smoking anywhere in their building or on their grounds. Partly, I think, it's because they make sports-related gear, partly because it probably helps keep health insurance premiums lower, and partly because the factory is so full of lint that fire is a serious hazard.

In Denver, it was odd to see smoking banned most places and pot for sale.