“Drop that water bottle and hit the ground!”

One of my Sunday morning chores is to take all the empty recyclable soda bottles and cans I’ve accumulated through the week and drop them off at one of the grocery store recycling centers. Pop them through the recycling machines, get my little credit slip for $1 or whatnot, and then go into the store and buy something with the credit slip. We all do it.

Now here’s the thing.  In addition to buying national soft drink brands, such as Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi, I will on occasion buy the generic store brand – sometimes doing so if there’s a massive sale, or if don’t see a good reason to pay $1.69 for a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke when I can spend $1.09 for the same sized Stewart’s Diet Cola.  So my Sunday morning recycling bag has a mixture of national and store brands.

So Sunday morning, when I took my recyclables to my local Hannaford store, I saw that the automated bins now had a new sign above them, reflecting New York’s change to accept 5c deposits on water bottles.  Fine, I thought.  Not a big deal.

Except that the sign also said that Hannaford was not allowed to accept bottle deposits for any drinks that were not sold in a Hannaford store – which meant my recyclable bottles of Price Chopper diet soda and Stewart’s diet cola could not be redeemed at a Hannaford, as they once were.

I figured that wouldn’t be much of a problem – usually when you put your recyclable bottles into their automated machine, the bottles would automatically spit out any unacceptable bottles and flash the message “STORE DOES NOT ACCEPT THIS BRAND.”  At which point, you simply toss the bottle into the nearby garbage can, and David Paterson gets to keep the 5c deposit.

But then I saw another interesting clause on the recycling machine.  “It is illegal to redeem a bottle that has not been purchased in New York.”

At which point, I concocted this fictitious scenario in my mind.

La la la, driving down the Massachusetts Turnpike, I stop at one of the rest areas and pick up a bottle of Diet Coke for the remainder of my trip.  Drink, drink, drink, toss the empty bottle onto the floor of the passenger side of my Pontiac 6000.  Think nothing of it.

Sunday rolls around.  Gather up all the bottles from my home recycling bin, put the bag in the car, slip the extra bottle from the car floor into the bag, off to Hannaford I go.

I slide the bottles into the automated recycler, they go in one by one and all is fine.  In goes several Diet Coke bottles.

All of a sudden – sirens go off.  I look around.  I see an Albany police car screech to a halt outside the Hannaford entrance.

Two cops jump out of the car, running into the store and to the bottle deposit area.  Guns are drawn.  They’re pointing at me.

“ON THE GROUND! ON THE GROUND! DROP THAT WATER BOTTLE THAT YOU’RE GOING TO RECYCLE AND HIT THE GROUND!!!”

Huh – wha – okay okay okay, I drop to the ground.  What the heck is going on?  Is the store being robbed?  Are we under a terror attack?

One of the cops slaps handcuffs on me.  “You’re under arrest for trying to deposit a Massachusetts soda deposit bottle into a New York deposit machine.  Get in the damn cruiser.  You’re in big trouble now.”

In the distance, I can hear the Hannaford store’s Muzak audio track change to a version of the Ray Conniff Singers warbling “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do…”

</sarcasm>

So although I don’t think I’ll spend 20 years in Dannemora because I deposited a diet soda bottle from another deposit-charging state into New York, I can’t help but wonder if instead it would just be easier to simply take my bottles down to the Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society, and let them redeem the bottles for deposits for their sheltered cats and dogs.

Which I’ll probably do from now on.

That, or I’ll just switch to powdered sugar-free Kool-Aid. 🙂