Drinking, driving and littering - we need a new approach

Wednesday morning this week, there was a large pile of beer cans, beer bottles and other liquor containers in front of the Manitoba Legislature.

All of this - including 177 beer cans! - was collected alongside just 3 kilometers of Highway 59 north of Highway 44. The number of liquor containers thrown out of car windows and into the ditch has increased significantly this year compared to last year. This is a very troubling sign that we may be moving backward on tackling the dangers of drinking and driving. We need to re-examine how we are doing in the fight against this deadly behaviour.

Liquor bottles are not the only items thrown into the ditch by drivers and passengers in cars. In total, members of the Winnipeg Chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (with me in photo above), picked up 50 garbage bags of litter. Clearly, both in terms of liquor container litter and overall litter, there is much room for improvement in Manitoba.

In terms of roadside litter, I think we need a new new approach. In 1970, British Columbia became the first jurisdiction in North America to establish a mandatory refundable deposit system for soft drink and beer containers for litter control. Since then, the deposit system has been graudually expanded to all sorts of containers, including plastic bottles, glass bottles, and even the "tetra-pak" juice containers. The idea is simple. When you purchase a container and its contents, you automatically are charged a small but noticeable recycling deposit. When you return the empty container to a point-of-purchase, you get the bottle deposit back. Since it was introduced in 1970, the BC system has been a model for similar systems because of its high rate of effectiveness.

Perhaps it is time to look at an expanded container deposit-refund system for Manitoba.