Glass bottle deposits should be a quarter

I have a bunch of reasons for starting this blog, including thoughts on bike infrastructure to living in the city to politics to whatever else I feel like. For those reasons, when starting a blog, the content of the first post is difficult to choose. Anyway I'm going with the deposit amount on glass containers, ie the amount you can get for returning them. In general this amount is around 5 cents or so, at least here in New England. It should be raised to at least 15 cents (tripled), maybe a quarter even. Why? I think it would seriously cut down on the amount of broken glass strewn on the roads and in yards. If you needed to vent and felt like smashing something and you just happened to have a glass bottle in your hand, would you break it in the street and forfeit your five cents? I sure would! But what if that glass bottle was worth a quarter? Wouldn't you be more likely to save it and get your money?

More valuable glass bottles mean fewer bottles smashed in the street. Fewer bottles in the street means generally safer/more attractive places to live. I took a group bike ride this morning and was amazed how many times I had to swerve to avoid broken glass in the road. Would more expensive bottle returns perhaps encourage bicycling in a roundabout way?

Now obviously you can't just go and up the glass deposit without also changing cans and plastic bottle deposits. I believe glass is nearly 100% recycleable and is almost certainly better for you than plastic soda bottles. I don't know what needs to be done about this one, but I'm sure it gets into some tricky math as far as how to balance the deposit amount or make them different to encourage glass vs plastic or cans vs plastic. Making glass more viable to bottlers might just mean more glass bottles and thus more broken glass. Who knows?

And yes I know a higher deposit would make beer more expensive. But you can get the deposit back!