July 13, 2007
Bonita councilman pushing for bottle bill
By Elizabeth Wright
Friday, After a few hours cleaning up Hickory Boulevard with some neighbors last year, Bonita Springs Councilman Richard Ferreira took a look at the day’s haul: about 10 trash bags full of roadside litter.
Mostly, those bags contained discarded soda cans and empty water bottles.
The experience set Ferreira thinking about what other others states do to curb litter. In particular, he began to wonder why Florida is among the states that don’t offer any financial incentives for people who return their used cans and bottles.
In other parts of the country, when someone turns in a beverage container to a redemption center at a supermarket, it’s possible to collect a nickel or, in some cases, a dime or more.
That sort of payout is usually set up through a statewide program that requires beverage distributors to charge retailers a few cents extra for a can or bottle. The process varies from state to state, but that charge usually gets passed on to grocery shoppers, who then can get the money back if they bring back the empty containers instead of tossing them.
These laws, frequently called “bottle bills,” are not universally popular, though, and past efforts to get a bottle bill passed in Florida have failed.
Councilman Ben Nelson looked into the feasibility of a bottle bill earlier, but given the history of resistance to it around the state, he let it drop.
“I really do believe it’s a good thing,” he said, but the idea just didn’t look likely to ever pass in Tallahassee.
“We did quite a bit of research. We kind of came to an impasse.”
Ferreira, though, said he’s willing to take the time to push the issue now.
While he isn’t expecting to change Florida law simply by putting discussion of a bottle bill on next week’s City Council agenda, it’s a first step, he said.
What’s he’s hoping to do is bring it up briefly and ask for a vote on whether the city should work to get the law changed.
“I bring it up to bring attention to it,” he said.
A bottle bill is not the only way to curb littering, he said.
But roadside volunteers aren’t always plentiful, and law enforcement officers don’t always have the time to be citing people for tossing trash.
According to the Web site of the Container Recycling Industry, a Washington D.C.-based group that provides information to groups lobbying for bottle bills, 11 states have laws that encourage the return of used bottles and cans to redemption centers.
And some states, such as Iowa, New York and California, have had some sort of bottle redemption program in place for more than 20 years.
When Ferreira lived in New England, he saw that bottle laws worked.
He took the time to return his cans and bottles, and it wasn’t a hassle, he said.
And when others didn’t bother to clean up after themselves, the work of picking up bottles and cans and sending them on to recycling centers can be a way to earn a little money.
“The first thing it does is it makes the streets cleaner,” he said.
Ferreira doesn’t know, though, if there is a push elsewhere in the state to change the law. He isn’t sure how much it might cost businesses or grocery shoppers, or whether the state could take on some of the cost.
Figuring that out can come later, he said. “It’s got to start somewhere.”
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