A nickel in 1978 is a quarter today. Maine still pays a nickel.

The first U.S. bottle bill was Oregon’s, passed in 1971 with a five-cent deposit. ^[1] Maine’s own program was approved by voters in November 1976 and took effect in January 1978, also at a nickel. ^[2] That nickel has not changed in Maine in the decades since. ^[3]

A nickel in the 1970s was real money. The honest way to ask whether 25 cents is “too high” is to ask what that original deposit would be worth today if it had simply kept pace with prices. Using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U series, the answer is not close. ^[4]

From Oregon’s 1971 start, a nickel would need to be worth about 41 cents today to hold its purchasing power. From Maine’s 1976 enactment, about 29 cents. Even measured from Maine’s own 1978 effective date, the inflation-adjusted figure is about 26 cents. ^[4]

So the headline is not “raise the deposit far above what it used to be.” It is the opposite. A quarter is roughly what a 1978 Maine nickel is worth in today’s money, and it is still short of what the deposit was worth at the program’s founding. Oregon’s own environmental agency makes the same kind of comparison and lands in the same neighborhood: it notes a 1971 nickel held about 28 cents of buying power by 2010, and prices have climbed since. ^[1]

One caution the numbers demand: never say “25 cents just follows inflation” without naming a base year. It undershoots inflation from 1971, 1972, and 1976, and roughly tracks it from 1978. Only from a base year around 1987 or later would a quarter overshoot. The founding years are the honest anchors, and from all of them, a quarter is a restoration, not an increase.

The cleanest evidence that deposit value drives returns comes from Connecticut, because it is a before-and-after test in a single state. On January 1, 2024, Connecticut’s deposit rose from five cents to ten cents. The containers, the redemption network, and the law were otherwise the same program people already knew. ^[1]

The state’s own quarterly data tells the story plainly. Each quarter of 2024, under the dime, is set against the same quarter of 2023, under the nickel: ^[2]

Quarter	2023 (5¢)	2024 (10¢)
Q1	38.8%	51.9%
Q2	41.1%	56.6%
Q3	45.0%	70.7%
Q4	50.4%	77.3%

Every quarter of the higher-deposit year beat its counterpart, by 13 percentage points at the start and widening to 27 by year’s end. ^[1] More deposit value meant more containers coming back and off the roadside.

One honest caveat. Connecticut’s 2024 reform bundled the deposit increase with other changes to its redemption network, so this is strong evidence that modernizing a bottle bill with a higher deposit raises returns, rather than a laboratory-clean test of the deposit amount alone. The direction, though, is not in doubt, and it points the same way as Maine’s own two-tier program.

Maine does not have to imagine a higher deposit. It already runs one. State law sets a five-cent floor on beer, soda, and water containers and a separate fifteen-cent floor on wine and spirits containers larger than 50 milliliters. ^[1] The state’s own program page describes the same split in plain terms. ^[2]

Those two tiers make a natural in-state comparison, same year and same administering agency. In 2016, Maine’s mostly-nickel non-commingled containers were redeemed at 74.7%, while its fifteen-cent spirits containers were redeemed at 87.2%. ^[3] Maine’s own higher deposit already comes back more often than its nickel does.

There is a second reason the nickel persists, and it is about who benefits when deposits go unclaimed. Under Maine law, deposits on commingled containers that are never redeemed become the property of the commingling group, which decides how to use them. ^[4] That is the majority case, so most unclaimed deposits stay inside the industry-run system rather than returning to the public. Maine’s environmental agency has estimated that pool at about $16 million a year. ^[5] A deposit low enough to leave returns incomplete is a deposit that leaves that money on the table, and Maine’s law hands most of it to industry, not the state.