Hello, FilterForGoodians. Last week, I wrote about how recycling is going to be a big part of the next mayoral election here in New Orleans. The reason it’s going to be a big part is because recycling isn’t a big part of every day life in the city, and it should be. If you live in a city with no recycling program, chances are there are at least a few other people in your city who share the same recycling desires as you do. Now, there’s a site to bring you together.

Ecycler** brings together discarders and collectors. Discarders have recyclables in need of a good home, and collectors are those looking to give recyclables a good home. Let’s say you have a can full of glass bottles. You could go to ecycler and find a collector in your area. Once you find a collector, you’d schedule a time for them to come pick up your bottles.

To proceed in becoming either a discarder or a collector, you need to know whether or not you live in a bottle-bill state. The term “bottle bill” is actually another way of saying “container deposit law.” A container deposit law requires a minimum refundable deposit on beer, soft drink and other beverage containers in order to ensure a high rate of recycling or reuse.

Bottle reuse isn’t actually an idea that was started for recycling purposes, as in recycling to save the planet. Instead, it was recycling based on pure economics. The deposit-refund system was created by the beverage industry as a means of guaranteeing the return of their glass bottles to be washed, refilled and resold.

I’ve always seen those refund amounts on glass bottles and such, but I never understood what they meant. I decided to dig a little deeper. When a retailer buys beverages from a distributor, a deposit is paid to the distributor for each can or bottle purchased. The consumer pays the deposit to the retailer when buying the beverage. When the consumer returns the empty beverage container to the retail store, to a redemption center, or to a reverse vending machine, the deposit is refunded. The retailer recoups the deposit from the distributor, plus an additional handling fee in most U.S. states. The handling fee, which generally ranges from 1-3 cents, helps cover the cost of handling the containers.

The costs to distributors and bottlers can be offset by the sale of scrap cans and bottles and by short-term investments made on the deposits that are collected from retailers. In addition to this income, distributors and bottlers realize windfall profits on beverage containers that consumers fail to return for the refund.

This is why ecycler asks about bottle-bill status. Because the industry is regulated, there are certain rules that must be followed in order to ensure that your recyclables are processed properly. There’s also money involved, so keeping things organized ensures that programs like these can fiscally sustain themselves.

Do you use ecycler? Comment below and tell us about it.

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