January 28, 2009
Team pours themselves into expanding bottle bill
With some help from the West Branch Booster Club, a team of sixth-graders tracked how many bottled drinks sold at a couple of home football games.
And how many were strewn along the ground after the game, even though they had set out seven recycle bins beforehand -- and had the game announcer point them out over the public address system.
“Because water bottles, sport drink bottles, tea bottles and juice bottles are not part of the Iowa Bottle Bill, they are ending up in our landfills,” team member Sam Rozinek said.
Rozinek is one-fourth of the Bottle Rockets team, which also includes Travis Wolf, Lucas Lamont and Sam Aspelmeier. The team wants these four classifications of bottles added to the bottle bill, requiring consumers to pay a 5-cent deposit per bottle at the checkout lane.
The Bottle Rockets, one of seven West Branch teams vying for an eCybermission award, found projections that show that sales of sports drinks and water will surpass soda sales by 2010.
That’s next year, and that’s a lot of bottles, they said.
Take their figures from the two football games for example. At the Oct. 29 game, the Booster club sold 158 of the non-refundable bottles and 254 pop bottles, which are included in the bottle bill. Of the 412 bottles, only 83 (35 non-pop, 48 pop bottles) were recycled. They also found six extra pop bottles not sold by the concession stand, and even with that, only 21.6 percent of the bottles were recycled.
At the Nov. 7 game, the percentages were similar. Of the 202 non-pop bottles, 44 were recycled; of the 364 pop bottles, 71 were recycled. Of the 566 total, 71 were recycled, amounting to about 20.3 percent.
“These plastic bottles are not being recycled,” said Lamont, noting that their research shows that nearly 80 percent of plastic bottles are ending up in landfills or “as litter in our communities.”
Team members said their work on expanding the bottle bill has opened their eyes to notice more plastic bottles along the streets and on public property in West Branch. Rozinek said he noticed at a Hawkeye game that there were so many bottles thrown on the ground that some people came along with bags specifically to pick them up. Aspelmeier even got to fly out to catch the Outback Game, and noticed “a lot of plastic bottles in the trash at the airport.”
When Iowa’s bottle bill passed in 1978, the state discovered that residents threw away 79 percent fewer of the included containers. The Bottle Rockets think they will see a similar drop if non-pop bottles are included.
The bottles take some 700 years to decompose, and possibly as many as 1,000 years if buried and smothered.
It takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to make a year’s worth of plastic water bottles, and Americans chug through about 2.5 million of them every hour, Lamont said. Wolf said that the amount of crude oil used in those plastic bottles could fuel 100,000 cars for a year.
Each of the team members said their research has affected their home life. Their families are recycling more.
Lamont said his family, which lives in the country, often burns their trash, but he found that burning plastic can create toxic fumes, so now he retrieves the plastic bottles and returns them for a deposit, or just recycling, instead.
“It makes you want to help,” he said.
The team hopes to convince mall owners in Coralville and Iowa City to put out more recycle bins in hopes people will recycle more.
“Me and my mom only found a couple in the food court,” Rozinek said. “When we went to throw our food away, we saw a lot of plastic bottles.”
Oregon started including non-pop bottles in its bottle bill this month. California, Hawaii and Maine are the only other three states that do so.
“Think of how many bottles we could save from spending 700 years in our landfills if we would just include them in our bottle bill law,” Rozinek said.
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