Oregon is one of the few states in the West to offer recycling redemption, meaning Washington doesn’t offer the program either. In the lower stakes world of recycling fraud, Idaho isn’t the only state the bottle collective is tracking. Ontario’s expansive cannabis market gets so much traffic from Idaho, where the drug remains illegal, that local leaders have spent the past few sessions pushing a bill that would allow the city to tax cannabis at a higher rate.Īnd although Planned Parenthood said it also planned to serve Eastern Oregon residents, the health care organization opened an abortion clinic in Ontario not too long after Idaho banned the procedure. While Ontario and Malheur County have long been border communities, their roles have taken on more meaning as the political divides between Idaho and Oregon grow. Malheur County is the only Oregon county in the Mountain Time Zone and Ontario is far closer to Boise than it is to Portland or Salem. The state’s pioneering bottle redemption system puts communities like Ontario in a unique position given its traditionally symbiotic relationship with Idaho. The Bottle Bill was popular enough that the Legislature bumped the recycling deposit from 5 cents to 10 cents in 2017.

According to the cooperative’s data, nearly 90% of recyclable bottles and cans were redeemed last year, handily trouncing the country’s 35% redemption rate. Since then, the law has proven to be both successful and popular. Oregon’s recycling program is the product of the state’s Bottle Bill, a 1971 law designed to clear the state’s beaches and roadsides of bottles and cans by having Oregonians redeem a deposit they pay upon purchasing a recyclable container.

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