Best practice innovation and government: bottle deposit bills and DC

Everett Rogers' book Diffusion of Innovations came out of his dissertation where he studied the "diffusion of innovation" through different sectors of the economy-society.  

For example, it took 17 years for a good innovation to percolate out through K-12 education, because of how it is organized--thousands of districts across 50 states and territories.

There used to be talk about how states can be "Laboratories of Democracy" in fostering innovation that is later taken up by other states--Mitt Romney's state health insurance program in Massachusetts ("Mitt Romney Finally Takes Credit For Obamacare," NPR) is one example, another is how the Children's Health Insurance Program started out of a community program in Pittsburgh ("CHILDREN IN CRISIS: The Story of CHIP," PBS documentary).

Today I think it is a lot more difficult than we realize between the lobbying of special interests (the conservatives have an especially good one in the American Legislative Exchange Council, which gets conservative legislation passed across the country), state legislatures that pre-empt local action, and just the amount of time required to organize and get something passed.

Another example is the penny.  We know we don't need it.  But copper interests kept their hand in Congress to keep it minted.  Finally, it won't be newly minted, but will still remain in circulation ("No more pennies? Coin collectors say end of penny will have little impact on hobby," St. Cloud Times).

At the local level, an example is bag charges.  DC did it in 2009.  The Wall Street Journal was up in arms ("In Washington, a Lesson in Bureaucracy Comes in Every Bag"), but a year later said it wasn't so bad ("Capital Takes Bag Tax In Stride").  But it's taken more than a decade for neighboring jurisdictions to pass similar laws, in part because of state action.

-- "Recycling, waste streams, plastic bags, and bottle bills," 2013

I bring this up because the DC City Council is considering a bottle deposit law ("Fight gearing up over D.C. bill to recycle bottles and cans for cash," Post).  Environmental groups put this on the DC ballot in 1988!!!!!!!!!!!! and it was defeated by organizing by the beverage industry.

That was around when I first moved to DC, coming off of about 10 years of Michigan already having such a bill, where it worked well at reducing bottle and can litter from beverages ("How Does Recycling Your Bottle and Cans Help Preserve Michigan’s Environment).

A few years ago, I walked from my house in Manor Park to Columbia Heights and back, and picked up almost 500 recyclable bottles and cans (not all subject to traditional deposit laws, some were from food).

I wonder what Everett Rogers would think of a 40+ year diffusion curve for bottle deposit laws?