Dear Garden Club Memebers,
I am a concerned citizen who lives in Corpus Christi . I am trying to encourage legislation to require a deposit on beverage containers in Texas.
I travel often in other states where they have a bottle and can deposit and I know that it works. It encourages people to pick up (or not carelessly discard) bottles and cans in public areas. Our "Don't Mess With Texas" campaign that my former employer, TX DOT created has done a lot to reduce trash on our roadsides, beaches and parks but the problem of beverage containers will always remain because of the open container law in vehicles. A deposit of 5 to 10 cents per bottle would not bother most consumers, especially if they knew they would get it back.
Glass on roadsides, beaches and rivers where our kids swim and play injures hundreds, if not thousands of children every year. Jagged shards of bottle glass puncture tires and shredded aluminum cans from highway mowers injure wildlife and livestock as well. Cans and bottles buried in landfills amount to billions of dollars of electrical energy needed to smelt new ones from raw materials. Tourists to our state don't want to see bottles and cans littering the roadside.

Please help me and e-mail and write representatives to encourage them to act on this. I know it works. I have seen those areas where deposits exist and they absolutely DO NOT have the serious problem we have here in Texas. You can find a list of Texas Representatives at
www.ehcma.com/legislativeupdate.htm#FindYourLawmaker
Information on Benefits of a "Bottle Bill" can be found at:
http://www.bottlebill.org/resources/pr-jeffords-11-14-2003.htm

Thank You for your time.

Troy Hollan

By David on Friday, January 09, 2004 - 06:05 pm:

I'll vote for it....