It’s about time someone had the guts to cut the recycling out of our state’s local municipalities budget. The fact that local municipalities were mandated to hold a recycling program is absurd. Recycling is not our government’s problem. The beverage industry’s containers are designed to be taken back.

It was big businesses that convinced our government to spend America’s tax dollars on their trash. Coke, Pepsi Anheuser-Busch, Coors and The International Bottled Water Association fraudulently conned Americans and their elected officials into doing their dirty work.

These companies are the contributing sponsors of The National Recycling Coalition and recycling campaigns like Keep America Beautiful. This advertising was a sheer masterpiece of marketing genius, sowing inevitable confusion about the environmental impact of mass production and consumption.

Keep America Beautiful relentlessly hammered home the message of each person’s responsibility for the destruction of nature, one wrapper at a time.

With citizens convinced, our state government started taking out big businesses’ trash, all because Coke, Budweiser, Coors, and the glass companies conned us into believing that they don’t fit in the circle of producer responsibility.

Take a look at Canada, a country known for its outstanding conservation efforts. You will find an effective recycling program without funding from citizens’ tax dollars, but rather based on a system of returnable deposit. Our neighbor to the north did some number crunching and realized that they were actually paying for and spending tax dollars on corporate trash.

So, Canada signed a law that would require manufacturers to take responsibility for the collection and recycling of their containers.  The burden of recycling then comes off of the shoulders of municipalities and becomes the responsibility of the manufacturer and end user.

It’s not our government’s responsibility to take out the trash of big business. It’s the responsibility of big business.  Let’s give back that responsibility of recycling to the corporations who are making the trash. They’ll need to ad another R to the three R’s: reduce, re-use, recycle, and return.