Much of the movement toward mandatory beverage deposit legislation has withered away in the current anti‐regulation mood of the country. Even before the change in mood, the major focus of deposit laws was moving away from litter control and toward energy and resource savings. In fact, deposit laws have had a variety of repercussions on such factors as jobs, consumer prices, industry capital expenditures, energy consumption, and litter. The cooling emotions and lapse in time since most of the regulations were enacted provide a good opportunity to sort through the arguments and review the results. This paper attempts to present a balanced view of the issues surrounding this complicated topic. It find that the consequences of mandatory deposits have generally been somewhere between the initial predictions of groups favoring legislation and those opposing i