March 19, 2008
Judge leans on lawmakers to expand bottle bill
By Whitney Woodward
DES MOINES -- With a legislative proposal to expand the state's bottle deposit program in limbo, Lt. Gov. Patty Judge summoned a landfill director and redemption center owner to the Capitol Tuesday to advocate the plan.
The Culver administration is pushing lawmakers to add juice, water, sports drink and tea bottles and cans to the state's nickel-per-container redemption program. Judge said doing so would prompt Iowans to recycle an additional 200 million containers each year, on top of the 1.6 billion which are redeemed annually.
The program, created 30 years ago, now includes only alcoholic and carbonated drink containers.
"At that time, Iowa was seen as a champion of the environment," Judge said about the program's beginnings. "Very few states had taken such a bold step to keep containers out of their ditches and out of their parkways. ... It's time for Iowa to once more be a champion of the environment, by expanding the bottle bill."
But Sara Bixby, director of the South Central Iowa Solid Waste Agency, estimated that more than 2,000 tons of plastic containers which could be recycled are thrown away in her landfill each year. Expanding the bottle bill wouldn't help her business, but it would protect the environment, she said.
"We'd prefer to take garbage that can't be recycled," Bixby said.
The plan also would double the rate bottle redemption centers are paid for handling the containers, from one penny to two. "The redemption centers have done a great job for 30 years. Unfortunately, they have never had a raise," Judge said.
Adjusting that rate will help redemption centers, whose owners have repeatedly called for an increase to stay afloat. David Jones, who owns the MCF Can Redemption Center in Atlantic, said Iowa's centers earn less than 80 percent of other bottle bill states.
The penny per container fee has never been increased to account for inflation, and some centers have blamed the static fee as the reason they've gone out of business. "We need to get this thing on the floor and get it passed," Jones said.
But House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he is not sure if there's enough support in the Legislature to pass the bill.
Opponents have questioned if the redemption law's expansion would kill cities' curbside recycling programs. They also have said requiring people to tote more recyclables around would be burdensome. "There was some support for this bill in our caucus. There's also some disagreement with this," McCarthy said.
Earlier this year, Democrats declared Culver's original bottle bill plan dead. That first draft would have expanded the types of containers covered, while doubling the deposit to a dime. Consumers who returned their containers would have only received 8 cents back. Culver scaled back the plan in response.
Consumers still would see receive all of their 5 cents back under the current proposal.
Whitney Woodward can be reached at (515) 243-0138 or whitney.woodward@lee.net.
http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2008/03/19/news/iowa/5b6b84fc9ed4b83086257411000e1781.txt
