May 2, 2007

Editorial

A 21st century Bottle Bill

If the Bottle Bill is to be expanded to cover only a single additional type of beverage, water should be the one.

The notion that people would buy water in grocery stores seemed outlandish in 1971, when the Oregon Legislature enacted the Bottle Bill. Thirty-six years later, Oregonians buy an estimated 185 million bottles of water every year, and only a third of them are recycled.

Many hoped for a more ambitious expansion - an initial proposal would have required a 10-cent deposit on any sealed glass, metal or plastic bottle, can or jar containing more than 7 ounces and less than a gallon of liquid. But Senate Bill 707, approved by the Senate last week, adds just water bottles to the deposit law, which for 36 years has covered only cans and bottles of soda pop and beer.

Adding water bottles to the list, however, is an important step forward. The Department of Environmental Quality estimates that SB 707 would result in a doubling of the recycling rate for empty water bottles - about two-thirds of them currently end up in landfills or on roadsides, and if the bill becomes law about two-thirds will be returned to groceries for a nickel deposit.

That's 65 million bottles a year that will be diverted from the waste stream or kept from becoming litter.

Another provision of SB 707 could prove even more significant in the long run. The bill would create a task force to examine ways of improving the Bottle Bill.

Such a review is overdue. The beverage industry and the state's recycling programs have evolved since 1971 in ways that the authors of the Bottle Bill could not anticipate. While Oregonians are justifiably proud of their pioneering deposit law, other states have acted since to adopt container deposit, redemption and recycling programs, and some of their ideas may be worth borrowing.

Grocers in Oregon have accepted the Bottle Bill grudgingly from the start, and have opposed all proposals for expansion. The Bottle Bill creates problems of storage and sanitation for retailers, and adds to labor costs. Despite the popularity of the Bottle Bill, Oregonians are sympathetic to grocers' concerns - in 1996, voters rejected an initiative that would have lengthened the list of containers subject to the law.

A task force could seek ways to enlist grocers as more willing partners in the deposit-and-return system, and examine such alternatives as free-standing redemption centers.

A shift in the direction of redemption centers has already occurred, with most stores installing banks of automated can and bottle return machines. It might not be too big a step to turn the operation and maintenance of these machines over to a contractor, who would redeem containers for cash or grocery-store vouchers.

The task force should also consider an increase in the 5-cent deposit, which has remained unchanged since 1971. A third of a century of inflation has eroded the value of the deposit, resulting in a slow increase in the number of unreturned containers. Doubling the bounty on cans and bottles to a dime would undoubtedly boost the return rate, resulting in less litter and less trash in landfills.

For now, however, adding a deposit on water bottles would represent progress. Water bottles surely would have been included in the original bill if store-bought water had been common at the time, and they present fewer sanitation problems than other beverage containers.

The House should follow the Senate in approving SB 707 - and the task force should begin working on a Bottle Bill for the 21st century.