March 28, 2007
Time to beef up bottle law?
Many push for deposit on water, sports drinks
Gary Heinlein
When they voted to slap a 10-cent deposit on pop and beer containers 30 years ago, Michigan citizens couldn't foresee the day when they'd be buying millions of bottles of water and fruit and sports drinks.
But environmentalists say the state is awash in unregulated drink containers that have made its bottle deposit law increasingly outdated. All 10 of the other states with such laws have gone beyond Michigan, which was a pioneer in stemming the tide of bottles in landfills and along roadsides.
By most measurements, Michigan's law has been an unqualified success. Folks return more than 97 percent of the 4.3 billion bottles and cans of carbonated beverages sold here each year, according to state records. That tops the return rate of all other states and ranks Michigan's as America's No. 1 bottle recycling program.
Although retailers and distributors disagree, some environmentalists now say it's long past time to expand the law to include the wildly popular new drinks.
"You look around and what do you see? You see plastic bottles littering the roadways," said James Clift, policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council in Lansing, whose coalition of conservation and environmental groups claims 200,000 members. "We have a system in place that could collect those."
The nonprofit Container Recycling Institute of Washington, D.C., predicts these new drinks will be outselling traditional carbonated beverages, such as pop and beer, by 2010.
If that forecast proves accurate, state leaders must figure out how to deal with at least another 4 billion cans and bottles, besides those subject to the 10-cent deposit. Based on Michigan's overall recycling rate of 20 percent of its garbage -- the lowest among Great Lakes states and 28th in the nation -- 3.2 billion containers otherwise will end up in landfills and on shoulders of roads each year.
Grocers oppose idea
Expansion of the state deposit law, which polls consistently show is backed by about two-thirds of Michiganians, is far from inevitable. The idea is opposed by the state's politically potent drink distributors and grocers, whose stores are required to take back sticky bottles and cans redeemed for the deposit money.
Critics of the bottle law say it already adds a nickel to the cost of every can of pop and beer sold in Michigan, in addition to the deposit. When a bottle isn't returned, three-fourths of the unclaimed deposit goes to the state for environmental cleanup, and the remaining fourth goes to retailers. There's no apparent advocate in the Legislature for expanding the law, whose angel in 1976 was the Michigan United Conservation Clubs.
Even some citizens have mixed feelings about extending the deposit law to other beverage containers.
Farmington Hills resident Erik Tuft, a transplant from Seattle 1 1/2 years ago, is among them.
"Grocery stores are good because they're convenient," said Tuft, a Ford Motor Co. product designer. "(But) I'd be against it if it's a government program. If it could be run by the private sector in some way, I'd be for it."
Officials at west Michigan-based Meijer, which has 176 food markets in five states, maintain that piles of unwashed bottles and cans containing drink residue -- and far more objectional stuff -- don't belong near food. The retailer takes in 800 million returnable containers yearly at its Michigan stores -- "far more" than it sells, the company says, and it wants no more.
"We think, as a general proposition, the return of garbage to the store is a bad idea," said Meijer spokeswoman Stacie Behler.
Curbside recycling backed
Republican state Rep. Geoff Hansen, who owns a family-run grocery store in his small northwest Lower Peninsula hometown of Hart, plans to introduce legislation to promote curbside recycling rather than an expanded bottle bill.
His bill would require Michiganians to pay a 1 cent fee on all purchases exceeding $2 -- 1 cent no matter whether the purchase amounted to $2.01 or $201 -- to raise at least $50 million for local recycling programs.
Hansen introduced the same "penny plan" last year, but it didn't pass. He now hopes to recruit a partner or two from the Democratic House majority.
"My whole thing is to find an alternative" to bottle bill expansion, Hansen said. His family store, he said, sells 800,000 bottles and cans a year and takes in 2.2 million.
"It costs us at least $50,000 a year to take them in, and that's not including the $100,000 worth of equipment we had to buy," Hansen said. "We physically cannot take any more (bottles and cans). We have no more room."
State Sen. Patricia Birkholz, R-Saugatuck, who served on a Senate recycling task force in 2003, also is working on legislation to deal with the issue.
But she, too, opposes a blanket expansion of the bottle law and said she's headed more toward broadening general recycling programs. Her plan also might ban drink containers from landfills, so they would have to be recycled.
Clift and other environmentalists, however, say there are ways to overcome obstacles to expansion of the bottle law. For example, the state could build strategically placed container return centers, then exempt smaller stores from having to accept used bottles and cans, he said.
Brad van Guilder, a community organizer at the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, says lawmakers should be thinking about both a bottle bill expansion and beefed-up recycling efforts.
"The penny plan certainly is helpful because it expands recycling," van Guilder said. "But you'd never get the same recovery rate as with the deposit law. We have always supported expansion of the bottle bill because it's Michigan's best recycling program."
You can reach Gary Heinlein at (313) 222-2470 or gheinlein@detnews.com.
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