April 11, 2008
Push On To Expand Bottle Bill
by Melinda Tuhus
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Scarlet Ewing would like to see the state add five-cent deposits on water bottles. Shaw’s — where she already redeems bottles — has a different view.
Ewing regularly redeems her recyclable bottles and cans outside the Whalley Avenue supermarket. She said adding a five cent deposit on water bottles and recycling them, which the state legislature is considering doing, ‘“would be better for the environment. You wouldn’t have them laying around, and it would be an incentive to recycle them.”
Back in the late 1970s, the state passed one of the country’s first bottle bills. To date only 10 other states have passed similar legislation. But Connecticut’s law covers only carbonated beverages, including beer and soft drinks. For years, environmentalists have been trying to expand the deposit to non-carbonated beverages. Though some bills have come close to passage, none has succeeded.
This year’s bill originally called for adding just single-use plastic water bottles to those containers requiring a deposit. The bill was expanded in the Environment Committee to include other non-carbonated beverages — all the teas and non-bubbly drinks that have exploded on the market in recent decades — along with the almost a half a billion single-use bottles of water sold annually in Connecticut.
To increase the bill’s chances of passage, some of its supporters expect it will be scaled back to just water bottles before coming up for a vote in the coming month.
Aaron Aguilar (pictured) was also redeeming the cans and bottles he picks up to make a little extra cash. He was understandably in favor of expanding the universe of bottles he could redeem.
Asked for the grocer’s position on the bill, a Shaw’s manager referred the question to the Connecticut Food Association, which represents the supermarkets throughout the state. Its executive director, Stan Sorkin, said his organization is supporting single-stream recycling instead of the bottle bill.
“It’s a better alternative,” Sorkin said. “It’s a total solution to environmental issues; single-stream recycling is clean, convenient, and economical, where residents put all forms of recyclable materials in one large bin curbside. It increases the recycling rates dramatically and lets cities increase their profits [from selling recyclables rather than having to pay to get rid of trash]. It lowers tipping fees, plus money is made from recycling the product.”
What about single-use water bottles that are consumed away from home, and either tossed in the trash or discarded on the ground? Sorkin said he has no data on that, but maintained that single-stream residential recycling is still the best option. He said it’s up and running in Bristol, Connecticut, with a pilot project starting this fall in Hartford.
“They are two very different strategies for different streams,” said Martin Mador, the legislative and political chair of the Connecticut chapter of the Sierra Club. “The issue with water bottles is that many of these do not originate in the home, so they won’t be part of home waste stream. That’s why we need the bottle bill in addition to other recycling strategies.”
Betty McLaughlin agreed. Formerly a lobbyist for Connecticut environmental groups, she now works from her home in Glastonbury as the executive director of the Container Recycling Institute, keeping tabs nationally on these issues.
“The only reason the grocery industry is hawking the single-stream recycling is, they are opposed to the bottle bill. And they are very deliberately trying to make people think that it’s an either/or proposition — that you either support curbside recycling or a bottle bill. Everyone who’s an environmentalist, who cares about recycling, will say to you, ‘We need to do both.’ One system captures the stuff at home, and we need the bottle bill to capture the stuff that’s consumed away from home.”
Sorkin said grocers “lose from two to six cents on every bottle or can recycled.”
“If that’s true,” countered McLaughlin, “why don’t they go to the General Assembly and say, ‘We need more money to run this program you forced on us’? They have all the numbers on what it costs. Until they present those numbers and make their case, I don’t believe them.” She added that grocers do not keep all the deposits (called “escheats”) from unredeemed bottles and cans, but rather, “It’s a wash for them because they pay the deposit to the distributor when they buy the product, and then they receive it when they sell the product because the customer gives it to them. Then, they pay it out to the the customer when the customer returns the empty, and the store gets reimbursed the nickel they gave the customer from the distributor when the store returns the empty to them. What that means is, if the store never gets the container back they have nothing to return to the distributor, but it doesn’t matter because they are already whole.”
All those nickels added up to $23 million in 2003, the last time she looked into it; she said it’s probably higher now.
The bottle bill expansion is one of four environmental bills Mador is urging Sierra Club members to support — the ones he thinks have the best chance of passing and could have the biggest impact. The other three are the “Toxics Toys” bill (HB5601, HB 5650), which would ban toxic substances in children’s products; the Climate Change/Global Warming Bill (HB5600), which would study where emissions of greenhouse gases come from, and start setting limits; and the Face of Connecticut Bill (HB5873), which calls for preservation of open space and farmland, and provides significant funding.
