Hey Mr. Green! 

Q: I live in a small town. We don't have curbside recycling, but we used to have dumpsters for collecting recyclables. Now the county has taken them away with no notice or explanation. I used to put out one bag of trash per week. Now it's two and sometimes three. What can I do besides a sit-in protest at the county administrative offices? 

—David in Pelzer, South Carolina

A: Well, David, you’re basically floating on the same garbage barge along with everybody else who lives in areas where bottle deposits aren’t required. Governments and the private sector have done a lot to promote recycling, but without mandatory bottle deposits, the economic incentive isn’t there. Even the mere 10 states lucky enough to have such laws can face problems: California, for example, has suffered the closure of around 300 collection sites in the past year and a half. 

A lot of it is sheer economics. Glass is especially a problem for you: Less than 10 percent of glass gets recycled because of its low market value, transportation, and processing costs, plus the contamination of other materials, says the South Carolina Department of Commerce, which strongly encourages recycling.

Another big problem is that the prices for recycled material can fluctuate; if they drop too low, there’s not enough revenue to cover the cost of recycling. To pluck but a single example from the immense scrap heap of modern convenience, the price of one type of recycled plastic—“mixed colors industrial flake”—went from 36 cents a pound in May 2009 to 76 cents in January 2012, but since then has slid back down to the 2009 level. A big factor in this plunge was China’s “Operation Green Fence,” in which the country refused to take untold tons of recycled material from the United States deemed too contaminated to remake into other products.

Bottom line: I doubt that a sit-in would help all that much. Instead, check earth911.com to find a recycling center nearby if you plan to drive to another town that might have a pickup place.

If you want to go all-out activist, you could hook up with like-minded South Carolinians who tried to get a deposit law on the books about five years ago. The Container Recycling Institute offers a Bottle Bill Tool Kit with loads of information. But be prepared for a long fight. Bottle deposit laws were first proposed in South Carolina and other states more than 40 years ago. Industry and other interests can be pretty tenacious and long-range when it comes to protecting their sacred right to mess up the environment.