April 17, 2007
Backlash surfaces in road cleanup over bottle bill
Mannix Porterfield
A backlash could be building among Adopt-A-Highway volunteers as a protest against the Legislature’s failure to enact a “bottle bill” as a means of discouraging roadside littering of containers.
After six years of spearheading a cleanup along a 2-mile section of Old Lowell Road entailing dozens of volunteers, Thomas Key is sitting this spring out.
“It’s just ridiculous,” Key said of the bill’s failure in the recent legislative session.
“It’s time for people in Charleston to wake up. By withholding our services, I think that, hopefully, some business leaders and community leaders can come together and say, ‘Hey, we’re drowning in our trash here.’”
Key and his wife operate Old Otter Holler Farm, an organic venture that entails perennial flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruits in Pence Springs, Summers County, and after which the volunteer group was named.
Two of his volunteers, John Vulo and Jim Ozles, agree the group should boycott the annual spring cleanup to send a message to the legislators.
For about a year, Vulo has gathered refuse on his own because “we just can’t the look of it. We have a beautiful state and we’re screwing it up.”
Vulo, Key and Ozles agreed the bottle bill — aimed at imposing a redeemable, 10-cent deposit on all beverage containers — would have dramatically reduced the amount of trash discarded along highways.
“I would say 50 percent of the stuff out there is a bottle or a can,” Vulo said.
“If it’s in plastic, aluminum or glass, it’s out there. I haven’t picked up for a month when the session closed and the bottle bill sat idle there. That really upset me.”
Ozles has lived in three states with bottle bill laws in force — Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut — and said all appeared to be achieving their intended purposes.
“I’ve never seen an issue as far people importing bottles from other states or going to another state to avoid the 10-cent tax,” he said.
“It seems to have worked very successfully, particularly in the Northeast.”
Flooding such as that experienced last weekend decorates his summer cottage site along the Greenbrier River with an “amazing” amount of plastic containers, he said.
“You would not believe how much garbage we have to pick up,” he said.
“People chuck it out on my property. Over 75 percent is some sort of a container, plastic, aluminum or glass.”
Key figures the special interests in industry are “just too powerful” to get the bill enacted.
“It would take about 50 percent of the trash out of the ditches,” the Pence Springs resident said.
“It would create jobs. It would save space at landfills. It would promote recycling. It’s just a win-win situation. There are all kinds of benefits from enacting a bottle bill.”
With some 30,000 volunteers annually picking up such refuse, Key suggested a boycott might grab the attention of the Legislature.
“If they just boycotted some of these cleanups, it may provide the incentive for our officials to act,” he added.
mannix@register-herald.com
http://www.register-herald.com/local/local_story_107215648.html
