December 31, 2008
Bottle Bill will take new shape in 2009
Changes will make returns easier for consumers but more complicated for stores
Come Thursday, Oregonians will find their treasured Bottle Bill changed:
-They will pay an extra nickel for every water bottle they purchase — and they will be able to return their water bottles to the grocery store to get their 5-cent deposit back.
-They will be able to take back any brand beverage container to any large grocery store that sells that type of beverage. For example, a store that sells soft drinks must accept and pay a refund on any brand of soft drink container.
It's part of the changes to Oregon's bottle bill approved by the 2007 Legislature.
The changes have created a quagmire for grocery stores and distributors trying to find a way to ensure that the nickel deposit ends up with its rightful owner.
Under the new Bottle Bill, the discrepancies between how much money consumers paid in bottle deposits and how much a store returned to consumers could vary widely.
Until Thursday, Oregon's Bottle Bill required stores to take back only those brands of beverage containers that they sold. Also, the distributors of soda and beer work in territories, making it easier to track the 5-cent deposit.
Coke, for example, is taken to all of the grocery stores in a region by one distributor. It is easy to track the nickel deposit back to the distributor, said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer stores.
Water bottles are not so simple.
They are distributed by many outlets, and there are hundreds of brands — some of them produced in a limited supply for specialty stores.
"It is one of the biggest, most complicated projects we have worked on in a long time," Merrill said.
So complicated that grocery stores and distributors have formed a new cooperative — the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative — to reconcile all of the deposits among grocery stores and pick up the used containers.
The cooperative is an expanded version of an existing business — Container Recovery, Inc. — in the Portland metro and Salem area that picks up returned beverage containers. The new cooperative will pool money from all of the stores and pay back grocery stores for the nickels they paid customers.
To meet the needs of the expanded bottle bill, the cooperative has added three new operational centers, 15 truck routes and 45 employees statewide, said John Andersen, president of the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative.
In addition, the cooperative will have to pick up bottles more often from grocery stores.
"I don't think the stores have room to hold the additional volume," Andersen said. "I think most of them were pretty tight with space already."
Stores have had to add hundreds of bar codes to the redemption machines to accept water bottles.
Some stores have had to add another plastic bottle redemption machine. Roth's Fresh Markets has switched out a glass bottle redemption machine for a plastic bottle machine in anticipation of the number of water bottles coming back.
"We've made sure every store has two plastic (redemption machines)," said Michael Roth, president of Roth's.
But he doesn't expect sales of water bottles to decline because of the deposit.
"People use bottled water like they used to use a bottle of pop," he said. "If they want their water, they will continue to buy it."
Peter Spendelow of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality said that adding water bottles to the bottle bill will be good for the environment — far beyond simply saving space in a landfill.
"By recycling these things, we are not having to use as much petroleum, we are reducing our energy consumption, and we are using less greenhouse gases than if we were to make a new water bottle," he said.
Still, Spendelow estimates that the return rate for water bottles will be significantly lower than other beverage containers because of how they are used: on the go.
The state expects a return rate as low as 60 percent, he said.
http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20081231/NEWS/812310407/1001
