Following World War II the beverage market changed dramatically. The former multitude of local bottlers and brands began to give way to fewer, larger bottlers operating on a regional and national arena. These began experimenting with disposable containers designed to no longer have any value to the bottlers. Instead of the company logo, the words "No Deposit, No Return" now decorated the bottles.

We all know what happened next. We have seen the surprisingly unsettling picnic scene in Mad Men, in which Don Draper throws his empty beer can in the grass, while Betty cleans off the picnic blanket by shaking all the trash off onto the ground, like it was the most normal thing in the world. We have seen the Crying Indian shed his iconic tears over all the litter and pollution of modern civilization. The 1960s were not just a decade of economic growth and freedom for many -- they were also about discovering the environmental and social effects of this freedom. Environmental activists pushed back hard against the rising tide of litter, for instance pressuring Coca-Cola into offering a 5-cent deposit in 1971, arguing that producers should shoulder their share of the responsibility for a feared landfill crisis.

Bottle legislation was a systematic and political response to this one key component of the growing litter problem. As early as 1953, Vermont introduced a bottle bill banning non-refillable bottles, but the law lasted only four years due to heavy lobbying from the beer industry. In 1971, Oregon implemented the first bottle bill requiring a deposit. This deposit was five cents, just like it is today. How many other prices have remained the same over 42 years? Vermont followed in 1973, and Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, and New York had followed by the early 1980s. A number of proposed bottle bills in other states had been struck down by industry opposition. The beverage industry fought the new bottle bills tooth and claw, seeing them as a "direct and politically motivated infringement on the free market and a threat to profits," as geographer Matthew Gandy wrote in Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste.

Bottle deposits met with massive resistance from New York grocers, who argued that their business was "selling goods, not buying trash." Most city grocery stores were small, and were more interested in stocking their limited space with increasing amounts of beverages people could buy than in storing empty bottles. Nor did they care much for the new clientele that the bottle bill brought into their stores. There was "not an ecologist among them," as the owner of an Eighth Avenue deli stated in 1971. Issues of race and class clearly factored into most storeowners' resistance to bottle deposits.

Empty beverage containers and their collectors become problems because they are so visible, which is expertly depicted in Redemption. The canners with their enormous sacks of bottles and cans stick out as something that does not belong in our modern cities. They would perhaps not exist without the bottle deposit, but getting rid of it would certainly not solve the underlying problems that made it impossible for them to make a living in any other way.