The United States has no national deposit on drink containers and no federal law requiring one. What it has instead is a patchwork: ten states - Oregon, Vermont, Maine, Michigan, Iowa, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, California and Hawaii - run their own container deposit programs, each with its own deposit value, its own list of eligible containers, and its own return infrastructure. Cross a state line and the same empty bottle can be worth ten cents, five cents, or nothing at all.

The law that started it, in 1971

Oregon passed the country's first Bottle Bill in 1971, putting a five-cent deposit on beer and soft drink containers well before recycling entered mainstream American policy debate. The deposit then stayed at five cents for more than four decades, and as inflation quietly eroded its real value, the incentive to actually carry containers back eroded with it - redemption rates drifted well below what the law had originally been written to produce. Oregon doubled the deposit to ten cents in 2017, and returns climbed back above 80 percent. The system is run not by the state but by the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, an industry-owned body whose BottleDrop centres let people leave a full bag of containers and have the refund credited to an account rather than stand at a machine feeding them in one by one.

Where the deposit is worth more, the containers come back

The pattern across the ten deposit states is consistent enough to be predictable: the higher the deposit, the more containers are returned. Michigan, at ten cents since 1978, has spent most of its history at or near the top of national redemption rankings. States that left their deposits at five cents through decades of inflation have generally watched their return rates slide. Meanwhile around forty states have no deposit system at all, and in many of them state law actively prevents individual cities from creating one - the same preemption pattern that blocks local plastic bag rules across much of the country.

Sources

U.S. Deposit Laws - Bottle Bill Resource Guide
BottleDrop - Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative