May 3, 2008
Expansion of bottle bill ‘dead’
By Ed Stannard
It doesn’t look like there will be a nickel deposit on bottled water, iced tea or juice this year, and a single-stream recycling pilot project may not get off the ground because of state budget woes.
The two bills are in legislative peril for different reasons; the bottom line is recycling is not faring well in this year’s General Assembly session, said state Sen. Edward Meyer, D-Guilford, co-chairman of the Environment Committee.
The bottle-recycling bill was scrapped due to lack of support from House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford, Meyer said this week. “We have not been able to get any assurance from the House that if we pass the bill in the Senate that the House will take it up,” he said.
Ultimately, the bill was “stripped,” a legislative device in which an entirely new bill is substituted under the same title. The bill now would stop the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority from seizing land in Franklin and Windham for a dump.
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“The water bill is dead,” Meyer said. The bill would have added a 5-cent deposit to bottles of water and other nonfizzy drinks. There are an estimated half-million bottles of water sold in the state each year, many of which end up littering the landscape.
Amann’s spokesman, Larry Perosino, said Amann did not favor the recycling of noncarbonated beverage containers, but “if the advocates of the bottle bill can show him that there are enough votes in the House to pass it, he would not prevent it from coming up for debate.”
Perosino said Amann prefers recycling such containers. “He thinks that the impact on retailers to accept all the additional bottles would be a burden on business and that the single-stream recycling is a cleaner and more efficient way to handle all recyclables,” Perosino said.
But a bill that would have established a pilot program in the state for single-stream recycling would require new state money and so is iffy for this session, Meyer said.
Perosino agreed with that assessment. Single-stream recycling is “unlikely to go because it has a million-dollar price tag on it, which, prior to the state surplus evaporating, seemed like a good idea.”
The pilot program would have been set up in three communities — urban, suburban and rural. Homeowners would toss their cans, bottles, paper and cardboard into one recycling bin rather than separating them.
One bright spot for environmentalists is that a bill setting limits for carbon emissions is likely to get through the assembly, Meyer said.
“It sets the date of 2020 for a 10 percent reduction and it sets 2050 for an 80 percent reduction in carbon dioxide,” Meyer said. State agencies would oversee their areas of responsibility: the Department of Transportation for trains and motor vehicles, the Department of Public Utilities for power plants.
Those areas “are the two biggest emitters of carbon and greenhouse gases,” Meyer said.
Curt Johnson, senior attorney for the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, said putting a deposit on Gatorade and Aquifina bottles makes sense because it has worked for soda and beer bottles. People are less likely to throw away bottles if they can redeem them for cash, he said.
During the fund’s annual cleanups along riverbanks, “We just find many, many more water bottles than we do carbonated beverage bottles,” he said.
As for single-stream recycling, Johnson said he understood the state’s money shortage, but he believes the state should invest “a few million dollars in the Department of Environmental Protection itself, which is seriously underfunded.”
Johnson said a $2 million increase, 0.01 percent of the $18.5 billion state budget, would pay for 50 more DEP staff members to enforce clean air and water laws, help clean up industrial brownfields, advise municipalities on wetlands laws and keep watch over the state’s parks.
“I think the state has to grow up and realize that environmental protection does cost some money,” Johnson said. Gov. M. Jodi Rell proposed $40.4 million for the DEP for 2008-09.
The budget, once in surplus, is facing a $67.7 million deficit, Comptroller Nancy Wyman said this week.
Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@nhregister.com or 789-5743.
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