February 19, 2008
Letter to the Editor
Bottle bill has value
Following a recent hearing on Senate Bill 258, which would establish a "bottle bill" in Kansas, an article appeared in The Capital-Journal which said I was uncertain as to whether a mandatory beverage container deposit law would yield a net environmental benefit.
Please allow me to clarify our department's position on this point and explain some differences between recycling under a bottle bill and under current voluntary conditions.
First, in written testimony before the Senate Natural Resources Committee, we stated it would be likely the bill would yield "overall positive environmental results." Those benefits include conserving valuable landfill space, reduced consumption of energy and material resources and reduced emissions of pollutants generated in the wide variety of industrial processes used to make containers from virgin raw materials.
However, under a bottle bill, there would also be some relatively minor impacts including added fuel use associated with the transportation of empty containers and the material and energy consumed to construct and maintain thousands of climate-controlled locations to store the billion-plus containers that would be returned for deposits each year.
In most current recycling programs in Kansas, beverage containers are recycled along with paper products and other plastic and steel packaging. A few hundred community recycling centers exist across Kansas to handle all materials. These are usually efficiently run with relatively low utilities and cleaning requirements.
Under a bottle bill, many thousands of retail establishments and redemption centers would need to allocate space to store and sort beverage containers by wholesaler, and cleanliness would be of high importance since food is often stored or sold in the same facilities.
This new network of storage areas would certainly add some environmental "impact," but based upon various studies, KDHE believes the impacts wouldn't outweigh the benefits.
BILL BIDER, director, Kansas Department of Health and Environment, Bureau of Waste Management
