New Haven Independent: Push On To Expand Bottle Bill

Push On To Expand Bottle Bill

by Melinda Tuhus | April 11, 2008 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

woman%20with%20can%20machine.jpg Scarlet Ewing would like to see the state add five-cent deposits on water bottles. Shaw’s — where she already redeems bottles — has a different view.

Ewing regularly redeems her recyclable bottles and cans outside the Whalley Avenue supermarket. She said adding a five cent deposit on water bottles and recycling them, which the state legislature is considering doing, ‘“would be better for the environment. You wouldn’t have them laying around, and it would be an incentive to recycle them.”

Back in the late 1970s, the state passed one of the country’s first bottle bills. To date only 10 other states have passed similar legislation. But Connecticut’s law covers only carbonated beverages, including beer and soft drinks. For years, environmentalists have been trying to expand the deposit to non-carbonated beverages. Though some bills have come close to passage, none has succeeded.

This year’s bill originally called for adding just single-use plastic water bottles to those containers requiring a deposit. The bill was expanded in the Environment Committee to include other non-carbonated beverages — all the teas and non-bubbly drinks that have exploded on the market in recent decades — along with the almost a half a billion single-use bottles of water sold annually in Connecticut.

To increase the bill’s chances of passage, some of its supporters expect it will be scaled back to just water bottles before coming up for a vote in the coming month.

aaron%20with%20shopping%20cart.jpg Aaron Aguilar (pictured) was also redeeming the cans and bottles he picks up to make a little extra cash. He was understandably in favor of expanding the universe of bottles he could redeem.

Asked for the grocer’s position on the bill, a Shaw’s manager referred the question to the Connecticut Food Association, which represents the supermarkets throughout the state. Its executive director, Stan Sorkin, said his organization is supporting single-stream recycling instead of the bottle bill.

“It’s a better alternative,” Sorkin said. “It’s a total solution to environmental issues; single-stream recycling is clean, convenient, and economical, where residents put all forms of recyclable materials in one large bin curbside. It increases the recycling rates dramatically and lets cities increase their profits [from selling recyclables rather than having to pay to get rid of trash]. It lowers tipping fees, plus money is made from recycling the product.”

What about single-use water bottles that are consumed away from home, and either tossed in the trash or discarded on the ground? Sorkin said he has no data on that, but maintained that single-stream residential recycling is still the best option. He said it’s up and running in Bristol, Connecticut, with a pilot project starting this fall in Hartford.

“They are two very different strategies for different streams,” said Martin Mador, the legislative and political chair of the Connecticut chapter of the Sierra Club. “The issue with water bottles is that many of these do not originate in the home, so they won’t be part of home waste stream. That’s why we need the bottle bill in addition to other recycling strategies.”

Betty McLaughlin agreed. Formerly a lobbyist for Connecticut environmental groups, she now works from her home in Glastonbury as the executive director of the Container Recycling Institute, keeping tabs nationally on these issues.

“The only reason the grocery industry is hawking the single-stream recycling is, they are opposed to the bottle bill. And they are very deliberately trying to make people think that it’s an either/or proposition — that you either support curbside recycling or a bottle bill. Everyone who’s an environmentalist, who cares about recycling, will say to you, ‘We need to do both.’ One system captures the stuff at home, and we need the bottle bill to capture the stuff that’s consumed away from home.”

Sorkin said grocers “lose from two to six cents on every bottle or can recycled.”

“If that’s true,” countered McLaughlin, “why don’t they go to the General Assembly and say, ‘We need more money to run this program you forced on us’? They have all the numbers on what it costs. Until they present those numbers and make their case, I don’t believe them.” She added that grocers do not keep all the deposits (called “escheats”) from unredeemed bottles and cans, but rather, “It’s a wash for them because they pay the deposit to the distributor when they buy the product, and then they receive it when they sell the product because the customer gives it to them. Then, they pay it out to the the customer when the customer returns the empty, and the store gets reimbursed the nickel they gave the customer from the distributor when the store returns the empty to them. What that means is, if the store never gets the container back they have nothing to return to the distributor, but it doesn’t matter because they are already whole.”

All those nickels added up to $23 million in 2003, the last time she looked into it; she said it’s probably higher now.

The bottle bill expansion is one of four environmental bills Mador is urging Sierra Club members to support — the ones he thinks have the best chance of passing and could have the biggest impact. The other three are the “Toxics Toys” bill (HB5601, HB 5650), which would ban toxic substances in children’s products; the Climate Change/Global Warming Bill (HB5600), which would study where emissions of greenhouse gases come from, and start setting limits; and the Face of Connecticut Bill (HB5873), which calls for preservation of open space and farmland, and provides significant funding.

Comments

Posted by: Nan Bartow | April 11, 2008 10:33 AM

As someone who cleans up endless amounts of bottles and other trash that defile our public parks, rivers, and ponds, I strongly support an expansion of the Bottle Bill. If more bottles were redeemable, fewer people would throw them out on our streets and in our woodlands. If they were thrown out, many people would pick them up and redeem them for cash. The supermarkets should support the Bottle Bill rather than oppose it. A cleaner environment benefits everybody.

Posted by: stan sorkin | April 11, 2008 10:54 AM

There is a major error in the bottle bill article.
The quote by McLaughlin that grocers keep the $23 of unredeemed deposits is out and out wrong. The unredeemed deposits are kept by the soda and beer distibutors.

The grocer loses money on every bottle handled. We give out a nickel on every bottle redeemed in our stores. In addition to carbonated beverages and beer sold in grocery store, we give out nickles for those products bought in drug stores, vending machines,gas stations, big box stores, and convenience stores. Did you ever try bring bottles to drug store?

Please corect the statement..

Posted by: Hartford Johnson | April 11, 2008 12:04 PM

Excellent. Let's expand it to anything that even looks like a bottle.

Posted by: fonseca | April 11, 2008 6:33 PM

Sounds great! There are few things as obnoxious as seeing people wrestling huge plastic wrapped cases of 20+ individual water bottles into their cars. What a waste of resources, bottled tap water trucked across the country and distributed in plastic bottles. Economics seems the only way to make people environmentally conscience and responsible.

Posted by: Gary Doyens | April 12, 2008 10:08 AM

The bottle bill is yet another tax on the consumer. I have never returned a bottle in my entire life for a refund. It's not worth my time and I'm not going to schlepp this stuff around to collect a nickle. Single source, which I'm already paying for through my extraordinary property taxes is the way to go. I drink a bottle of water in my car...toss it in the bin when I get home.

Having another level of tax for me, money for others, also creates more incentive for people to rummage through your re-cycling bin every Monday morning before the trucks get there. Please..let's use some common sense.

Posted by: Andy Bauer | April 13, 2008 10:07 PM

As I read the article and the post my Mr. Sorkin, I feel compelled to point out that Ms. McLaughlin is not quoted, she is paraphrased. Regardless, $23 million of consumer's money not going back to consumers? There's the real out and out wrong.

Further, there may be a grocer that redeems items they don't sell, but I haven't found that to be the case (and I have asked managers to redeem items marked for CT return and been turned down with "We don't carry that brand").

Ms. McLaughlin throws down a fair challenge. Do grocers or your lobbyists have numbers to back up your financial losses and have you presented them to the legislature? This seems like a reasonable request.

A cursory glance at trash cans in public areas shows that the number of recycleable bottles without a deposit far outnumber the ones with a deposit. So it makes sense that expanding the deposits to cover these other bottles would be a positive step.

Posted by: king james v | April 14, 2008 2:07 PM

I don't understand the logic that allows wine bottles, water & juice bottles and other non carbonated beverages using the exact same bottles as the carbonated beverages to escape the nickle that will likely keep them off my street, beach and front lawn. It baffels me how the grocery / beverage lobby can have such an impact. A few years ago i had the privlidge to do a program with New Haven's (and connecticut's) greenest lawmaker, the East Shore's Bob Megna, and was amazed by the crap that goes on in Hartford.
Water bottles need to be put on the deposit list, and i think some serious thought needs to be put into adding some kind of fee on styrofoam coffee cups, and take home food containers - i'm starting to see them blow into my yard quite a bit.

Posted by: Betty McLaughlin | April 16, 2008 11:08 AM

I'm afraid Ms. Tuhus misunderstood me when we discussed this issue. That's easy to do since the back workings of container deposit legislation are confusing. The grocery stores do not retain unclaimed deposits, the distributors do. By law, grocery stores are paid a small fee by the distributors for the service they provide in collecting these containers for recycling. Grocers receive 1.5 cents for every beer container that is returned to them, and 2 cents for every soda container. They only have to take back the brands they sell, and they don't have to take anything back at all if there is a redemption center within a one mile radius of their store. There are precious few redemption centers left in Connecticut because the legislature has not raised the handling fee paid to them and to grocery stores since 1986. This is wrong. Redemption centers and the grocery stores who wish to provide redemption services rather than outsourcing them to a nearby redemption center should be adequately compensated. As others have pointed out, collection rates are highest when redemption recycling and curbside recycling work in tandem. Curbside works for the things used at home, but not for the things that are consumed on the go. The financial incentive works - the eleven states that have bottle bills recycle as many beverage containers as the other 39 do, with only 28% of the US population. In Connecticut, about 70% of 1.6 billion deposit containers sold get returned through the redemption program annually. Adding non carbonated beverages would target 700 million more, at no taxpayer expense. This valuable material gets returned without being co-mingled, and that separation means it retains its high value for sale to end users who want it to manufacture new products. . It is truly a shame that the grocery industry will not recognize the great contribution to the community they make by participating in redemption recycling, especially when so many other industries want to "go green." This is something they can brag about that they have been doing for nearly 30 years in Connecticut.

New Haven Independent

Push On To Expand Bottle Bill

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