3 December—A front-page teaser about the Sunday rag in yesterday’s Republican-American told readers, “You’ll get $10 for every can and bottle you bring to the recycling center.” Wow! Something to look forward to. Eagerly. And you can trust your local newspaper.

It was corrected in today’s Sunday Republican: “A Page One tease Saturday to today’s Focus about changes to the state’s can and bottle redemption law incorrectly reported the amount you will get for returning cans and bottles. Read the full story . . . today for all the details surrounding this 10-cent per can change.”

Evidently enough readers complained about the $9.90 typo to motivate the correction. A single complaint seldom does the job, even for major errors.

Anyway, deposits on guilty bottles and cans in Connecticut will be doubled to a dime on 1 January. The five-cent deposit was the brainchild of a treacherous Republican state representative in 1978. Despite that, Rusty Post, a lawyer, climbed into the Senate that year. He eventually moved to Washington State and became a real estate broker. Had he not spearheaded the charge charge [sic], some Democrat was sure to do it.

The stated intent of Connecticut’s bottle bill—titled “An Act Concerning Solid Waste Management”—was to end the problem of drinkers’ litter left on roads, sidewalks, and lawns by all the usual suspects. To a certain extent, it worked. The real intent, however, was to fill the state’s coffers with unredeemed deposits, which would escheat to the state. That’s also worked, but probably not as well as the state had hoped.

So doubling the deposit and increasing the types of containers subject to deposit is intended to steal even more money from Connecticut drinkers—of, for instance, water, soda, beer, and now juice in plastic containers; but not dairy and non-dairy milk, wine, booze, and hard seltzer, or anything in paper containers.

Why the exceptions? Credit the lobbyists, of course. We won’t go into the so-called “nips,” shot-size bottlettes favored by alcoholics, that cost an extra non-refundable nickel, which is supposed to benefit the cities and towns where the boozers’ minis are sold. Boozers couldn’t care less.

The fun part of Connecticut’s doubled container deposits, as things stand, is that neighboring Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island still have five-cent fees. So Connecticut can expect entrepreneurs from those states—as well as other states with no deposits where appropriately coded containers are sold—to load their semis and clean up. That practice is considered fraudulent and is illegal in California, for instance. But not in Connecticut . . .