As long as they're increasing the sales tax ...

Trash pickers are pretty smart, they seem to target those areas where bottles and other items like that are present. I get my trash opened once a year, sometimes two and thats it. Im assuming thats a new person checking the scene to see what my habits are, or possibly the assumption that people turn over in apartments once a year, I dont know, but after they realize all my trash is trash they leave it alone. Being the cheap person I am I take my own bottles to the bottle machines, and I tend to give other items to good will. Theres no good reason to go through my garbage.

As for not using it for revenue I dont see what the problem is. We tax all sorts of other bad behavior like smoking and eating out. There is also word of people wanting to tax junk food. So consider the bottle bill a "sinners" tax on those who do not recycle. You increase the recycling in an area by pushing the bottle bill and any extra money you make is considered the "sin" tax like that on other items.

In Cambridge, there are a number of bottle scavengers, some of them filling shopping carts or even a truck at a time. And also some smaller-scale homeless people and the occasional crazy person.

But, at least in the parts of Cambridge that I (until recently) used to go through late at night, opening of residential trash bags is rare.

I mostly attribute this to Cambridge's recycling program, which has wide participation. Picking bottles from the household recycling bins is easy, and opening bags and going into barrels slows you down when you could be hitting more recycling bins.

If you're non-crazy, messing with bags and barrels is also risky, from injury (getting poked or cut by trash, or bit rats), fined or arrested by police who are patrolling, or having a backlash against bottle-pickers. Again, why bother, when the recycling bins are so easy?