In Michigan, there is a ten cent deposit law for carbonated beverages (pop/soda, beer, etc.) When you buy a bottle of pop, you pay an extra ten cents, the deposit. When you have finished drinking it, you can return it to the store you bought it from for ten cents back. So if you have, say, a hundred pop bottles to return, you get ten dollars back.

Well, most stores have a Bottle Room, where there are machines to process the bottles being returned. You stick the bottle in, the machine reads it, crushes it, and drops it into a bin and then prints out a cash receipt for the customer. However, working in this Bottle Room is indeed a very dirty job.

Most people, when returning their bottles, do not drink all the pop, dump it out, much less rinse it out. Thus, bottles can sit out in garages for months before they are returned, causing all sorts of...interesting...things to grow inside. Dead bugs, dead mice, frog eggs, and various fluids are all things that have been encountered while working the bottle room.

When the bins in the machines become full, the bottle room person must bring the bins to the back room to dump them into larger bins ( a company comes to take them away to the recycling center where they are remade into new bottles). The bins are heavy, and NEVER dry. The bottle person is constantly being splashed, dripped on, and often counters interesting smells.

The machines themselves become extremely filthy, and power cleaners are needed to wipe away the thick layers of grime and moldy sugars that accumulate even after just a day. I suggest that Mike Rowe work in a store's bottle room for at least a day or so, so people can see what happens when they return bottles.