July 16, 2007
Local residents push for bottle bill
By Rony Camille
MILFORD — Erna Johnson and Cathy Goldwater want be able to earn deposits on their recyclable bottles in New Hampshire.
Johnson and Goldwater were among a few area residents that met Monday at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation Church in Milford to listen, debate and discuss a possible bottle bill that would let consumers earn money for their recyclable bottles.
“The time has come to change the way we recycle in this state,” said Rep. Betty Hall (D-Brookline) who met with the residents.
The bill or “container deposit law,” would require the minimum refundable deposit on beverage containers that would encourage more people to recycle, said Hall.
When a consumer returns an empty glass they would get change ranging from five to 35 cents. Each container’s value is determined by the state and is usually stamped somewhere on the container.
The goal of the bill is reducing litter, conserving natural resources, and reducing solid waste going in landfills.
New Hampshire is the only state in New England that does not have a bottle bill.
Hall, who originally proposed this bill in the late 1970s and early 1980s, now has a working draft and she is speaking to people, seeking their help in “fine-tuning it.”
Hall said there are many reasons why the bill, which failed by a single vote in 1982 and failed again in 1998, needs to be re-introduced.
One of those reasons is that the state no longer has a statewide recycling coordinating program, which was discontinued by former Gov. Craig Benson in 2003.
“There’s no place for that stuff to go, and there is no coordinating effort to get materials recycled.”
In addition to the other New England states, other states that have a deposit laws are California, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Michigan, New York, and Oregon.
Oregon was the first state that passed a mandate in 1971.
According to the Container Recycling Institute, a Washington D.C. non-profit that studies the recycling of beverage containers, around 68 million cans and bottles have ended up in landfills, incinerated or littered roadsides in the United States so far this year.
If the bill is brought up to the Legislature, lobbyists for area grocery stores and beer manufactures will likely start a heavy campaign against the bill, Hall said.
When a bottle bill was debated in 1998, those who opposed it claimed that it would alter sales of beverages and send beverage-related jobs out of New Hampshire.
But Hall disagrees and said the bill would be written so that the program would be self-funded.
Anheuser-Busch brewery in Merrimack and Cola-Cola Bottling Co. in Londonderry are two of the major bottling plants in the region.
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