October 31, 2007
Herald Courier
Tennessee woman bicycles in support of recycling bill
BY Mac McLean
Marge Davis rode the last 25 miles of an 800-mile cross-state bike trip Tuesday when she pedaled from Johnson City to Bristol.
“I’m a bit of an anomaly,” she said while showing a yellow sign attached to her bike in support of Tennessee’s Bottle Bill. “People notice me and maybe they pay attention.”
Davis is a long-time advocate of bottle-deposit programs and is coordinator of Pride of Place, an all-volunteer group founded in 2004 to help promote such programs.
The Tennessee Beverage Container Deposit Act – sponsored by state Sen. Doug Jackson, D-Dickson, and Rep. Mike Turner, D-Old Hickory, is designed to promote recycling by creating a statewide bottle deposit program.
People would be charged a deposit fee of 5 cents per container on beverages in a bottle or a can. They could get the nickel back by taking the container to a certified redemption center, where it would be recycled.
The centers would be operated with a 3-cent-per-container fee the state would charge beverage distributors.
Jackson said he wasn’t planning to sponsor the legislation until Davis asked him to do so last year.
“She was so passionate about it and convincing that I decided to file the bill,” Jackson said. “I’m sure its day will come.”
Both Davis, who lives in Mount Juliet, Tenn., and Jackson said they’ve heard plenty public support for the bill over the past year. The legislation is set to go before the Tennessee General Assembly next year.
“Whenever there is a push for [a bottle bill] there is a big one,” Betty McLaughlin, executive director of the Container Recycling Institute, said of the efforts.
She said 11 states have bottle deposit laws on the books – most were passed in the late 1970s or early 1980s – and start-up campaigns are under way in seven states, including Tennessee, West Virginia and North Carolina.
McLaughlin said the efforts usually face strong opposition from the beverage industry, which doesn’t want to pay the additional money, and retailers who don’t want to be bothered with holding on to the containers.
But she thinks retailers wouldn’t have a problem with Tennessee’s version of the Bottle Bill because it would not require them to collect and store the containers unless they choose to do so.
“It’s a little bit of a burden [for consumers],” Davis said of the bill, adding some people might not want to pay the deposit fee or hang on to beverage containers so they can get it back. “But we’re the Volunteer State, and we ought to be doing our part.”
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