Bottle bill bonanza
A few existing and proposed container deposit programs made news recently.
In Baltimore, a 10-cent beverage container deposit program was introduced as part of a package of green bills by City Councilman James B. Kraft.
In Hawaii, beverage containers marked with the "HI-5" refund labels now are only redeemable at local redemption centers. The new rule concerns the recent addition of two-liter, or 68-fluid-ounce bottles, to the redemption program. Smaller covered beverage containers already have the appropriate labeling.
By a 13-to-seven vote, an Iowa House Environmental Protection Committee has passed a proposal that expands the Hawkeye State's three-decade-old beverage redemption program on several fronts. The measure expands the state program to include additional containers, such as water, tea, juice and sports drink bottles, but still retains the five-cent deposit level for all containers recognized by the program.
A scaled-back version of an earlier proposal issued by Governor Chet Culver, which would have doubled the per-container deposit to a dime and allotted a certain amount of funding for in-state environmental programs, HSB 734 also doubles the program's per container handling fee, from one to two cents.
According to a poll by the Des Moines Register (Iowa), 62 percent of Iowa adults support expanding the state's container redemption program to cover more types of containers. Only 29 percent of those polled were opposed to such a move.
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer signaled last week that he would be open to a compromise on his resubmitted "Bigger Better Bottle Bill," including, for example, expanding deposits only on water bottles or splitting revenues from the program with bottlers.
For the sixth straight year, the West Virginia Legislature failed to gain traction on its own bottle bill, as lawmakers shelved a measure that would have imposed a 10-cent deposit on beverage containers sold in the Mountain State. The bill's chief promoter, the West Virginia Citizen Action Group (Charleston), was not discouraged, calling the anticipated renewal of the bill in the 2009 session, "lucky seven."
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