July 28, 2008
Battle of redemption
Grocers want out of bottle-return business; consumers want convenience
Connie Vogel could do without the frustration of refeeding rejected Busch Beer cans into the recycling machine that keeps rejecting them.
“It spits out more cans than it takes,” the Veneta woman lamented at a can-return machine outside the West 11th Avenue Fred Meyer.
Mike Roe is no fan of the way the machine can jam, prompting a trip inside the store for a clerk who can unjam it — a fate the Eugene man escaped this day as he fed 45 bottles and cans into a reverse vending machine.
Terry Wester leans on the handle of a shopping cart brimming with his empties. The west Eugene man admits that his patience is tested by these waits for a turn at the reverse vending machine.
But don’t think these three bottle and can recyclers are ready to trade their trips to the supermarket bottle return to one of the proposed redemption centers being promoted by the grocery and beverage industries.
How many will there be? Will they get customers through any faster than the supermarkets do now? Will they be located where people run their errands or off the beaten path?
An industry-backed proposal to take most supermarkets out of the bottle-return business is shaping up as one of the biggest changes confronting Oregonians as their generation-old Bottle Bill program undergoes its first big overhaul since its 1971 enactment.
First comes the already-approved expansion to include water bottles, beginning in January.
From there, decisions must be made about what other beverage containers will join beer and pop empties in Oregon’s deposit-return system, and how much the deposit should rise from a nickel.
The redemption centers are considered necessary by many across the political spectrum to accommodate any expansion of the Bottle Bill that would include containers for such drinks as wine and liquor,sports drinks and other noncarbonated beverages, and water.
So what role will be filled by the 300 or so supermarkets across Oregon that now handle the bulk of Oregonians’ empty beer bottles and drained soda cans?
That’s where the biggest sticking point to moving forward with the Bottle Bill’s expansion lies.
“The battle will come down to what’s called ‘return to retailer,’ ” said Jerry Powell, editor and publisher of Portland-based Resource Recycling magazine and a member of the Bottle Bill Task Force.
“Can a grocer put up a sign saying, ‘We do not redeem, go eight blocks out on Franklin Boulevard to the redemption center?’ That’s what the grocers would want.”
Grocers and their comrades in industry see supermarket recycling as an unwelcome burden that would become unbearable under an expanded Bottle Bill. Consumers and environmentalists have never seen eye-to-eye with the industry on this and are willing to limit, but not eliminate, supermarkets’ role as return sites for empties.
The issue dominated last month’s meeting of the task force. The panel agreed to recommend to the Legislature a network of 90 redemption centers, but was too divided to weigh in on the role retailers should play.
The chairman had proposed reducing from 144 to 50 the number of containers per person per day that retailers must redeem.But industry representatives rejected the idea.They argued that retailers,other than those in rural areas, should not have to accept any containers at all.
When the task force meets again Tuesday, chairman John Kopetski said, it won’t revisit the redemption center issue; he wants to work through other issues before returning to what has proven the stickiest issue before the panel.
But Kopetski, a Pendleton stockbroker, said the redemption center question has to be worked out before Oregon can modernize its deposit-return program for bottles and cans.
“Redemption centers are the key to the whole issue,” he said. “If the redemption centers can’t be developed and recommended, then in my opinion it wouldn’t do us any justice to go and expand the list.”
Dan Floyd, director of public affairs and governmental relations for Safeway stores in Oregon, also serves on the task force. He said there is no compromising for supermarket chains on the question of allowing even a reduced number of bottles and cans to keep flowing to their stores.
The sanitation issues, demands for store space and strain on workers’ time is too much. Even with a cap on returns, he said, people will simply feed an excessive number of empties into reverse vending machines, getting around the cap by collecting multiple receipts to avoid exceeding the per-person limit.
“I guess you could call it a line in the sand. And it’s because we can’t afford to do both,” he said. “We can’t afford to run redemption centers and still deal with the cost, sanitation and space at the retail stores.”
The centers would be paid for through the money now kept by distributors when consumers pay the deposit but don’t collect it back by returning their empties.
Stores, distributors and bottlers would put additional money into a statewide cooperative that would run the redemption centers everywhere in Oregon except where populations are too sparse and driving distances too great to make them workable.
In those rural areas, stores would retain their role as locations where empties could be returned and deposits redeemed.
The grocery and beverage industry’s position isn’t popular among consumer and environmental activists.
Jeremiah Baumann, lobbyist for Environment Oregon, calls the convenience of taking bottles and cans back to stores one of the pillars of the Bottle Bill’s effectiveness. It saves people from making extra trips, and that ensures that containers get into the recycling stream instead of landfills, Baumann said.
Powell, the recycling magazine publisher and task force member, agreed, saying a compromise would have to be reached to let a small number of containers continue to flow to retailers — particularly so that the elderly and carless aren’t effectively blocked from participation in Oregon’s Bottle Bill tradition.
Joe Gilliam, president of the Northwest Grocery Association, said it’s in his industry’s interest to make sure that redemption centers go up where they’ll be easily reached by errand-running consumers, capable of quickly processing empties and returning deposits, without forcing consumers to wait in lines or do a lot of dirty work.
If the industry fails to create a network of consumer-pleasing redemption centers, then Oregonians will protest and policy-makers will force supermarkets back into their current role.
“I kind of get the feeling that people feel like we’re going to pull a sneaky one on them,” he said. “There’s nothing to hide here. We’re just trying to make it work financially and make it work for the consumer.”
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