Recyclists of SF

San Francisco - nexus for the industries of silicon and logic, erstwhile hub for countless wide-eyed Flower Children and their pharmacopoeia of psychedelics, and home to the most efficient army of hunter-gatherer recyclers known to mankind. These scavengers rove about the city filling carts of all descriptions with aluminum, plastic, and glass gold, pausing only to swig the last dregs of partially re-fermented beer from that hastily-discarded PBR. There's a lesson in here somewhere about economics: by raising its bottle deposits to the point where serial bottle-returning becomes a decent source of quick cash, California has effectively crowd-sourced recycling. As a result, they're able to post 74% recycling of beverage containers.

(I can hear the Hounds howling - this wealth-redistribution racket is straight-up capital-C Communism, a conspiracy perpetrated by Obama and his sleeper-agent terrorist-Jew-Illuminati cohort ever since the Dark Time of Marx to pave the way for such unimaginable horrors as public health care and tighter bank regulations!)

The bottle deposit is an effective tax on laziness, which is perfectly fine by me. After all, it's a fair bet that even if we taxed the beverage companies for making these containers in the first place, polluter-pays style, we'd end up paying this portion anyways (unless, in accounting for the total cost of production, that can of Coke became prohibitively expensive...)