In 2011 I went to Louisiana to visit some family. It had been about eight years since I'd been there last, and as a considerably older person I was able to recognize more of the differences between LA and MI. One of the firsts was their recycling programs. I had just finished a can of Coke and asked, "Where do you keep your cans?" At home we had a bag that hung by the back door where we would keep them until they eventually found their way to the garage, then the Meijer up the street. My Aunt Jean looked at me and said, "In the trash."

"The trash?" I was confused. I didn't realize that not everywhere provided a ten cent return on bottles. We drank an entire case of pop and a couple cases of beer that weekend. It all went into the trash.

The official name for bottle return incentives is Container Deposit Legislation or CDL. The United States on average recycles their aluminum cans, glass and plastic bottles 33% of the time. States with encouraging CDL, however, recycle theirs 70% of the time. Michigan is the top dog in this race with a 97% return rate! That's amazing! Our consistency is mostly likely the root of my shock in Louisiana. But actually, most states don't have any CDL -- only 11 do:

- California

- Connecticut

- Delaware

- Hawaii

- Iowa

- Maine

- Massachusetts

- Michigan

- New York

- Oregon

- Vermont

My actively recycling readers most likely already know how it works, but for everyone else let me give a brief explanation of CDL. When you buy your Mountain Dew or Budweiser at the store, you pay a certain amount extra for deposit. In Michigan, deposit is ten cents. So if you buy a 12 pack, you pay $1.20 extra at the time of purchase. You can get that $1.20 back though if you return the bottles when you've finished drinking from them. It's kind of like couponing. Technically, the deposit serves as a small penalty if you choose to not recycle, but I know from experience that it always feels like a penny saved when we leave the bottle return section with $40 in our pocket.

And why would you not want to encourage people to put a little more effort in for our planet? We literally have islands of plastic in our oceans becoming wasteland habitats and landfills for mountains. It's sad that we produce so much material that could be reused, yet we call it "disposable" or "one time use." The least we could do is recycle our cans. You've got to start somewhere, right?