October 9, 2009
Questions remain with new recycling law
A week-old ban on plastic bottles in landfills has trash haulers asking how they became recycling enforcers.
State legislators enacted the ban four years ago but delayed implementation until this month.
While there are no penalties in the law, Cumberland County officials are invoking their own code to fine haulers up to $600 a load for repeated infractions.
"They're putting it all on us," said William Skipper, owner of All American Sanitation in Fayetteville. "And we're not benefiting, other than saving the world or Earth or whatever. But, other than that, it's not doing anything except costing us money."
Bobby Howard, county solid waste director, said the haulers are right to be mad.
"If the state was so concerned about plastic bottles, why didn't they do like Michigan and have a bottle law, offer a deposit on a bottle?" Howard said. "They took the easy way out."
North Carolina doesn't have a bottle-deposit law because lobbyists for convenience stores, restaurants and beverage makers have bottled up the legislation in the General Assembly for years, according to the Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit research group in California that tracks the status of state bottle bills across the nation.
The Litter Reduction Act of 2009, sponsored by state Sen. Doug Berger of Youngsville, included a 10-cent deposit on all beverage containers. It went nowhere this year in Raleigh.
Aluminum cans already were prohibited in landfills. But Skipper said that ban didn't need to be enforced. Few throw away cans because aluminum is valuable and easily sold, Skipper said.
Nixon Spell, owner of Spell Sanitation Service in Autryville, said deposit laws work well in other states.
Spell visited an upstate New York convenience store where a clerk kept a bin for recyclable bottles and cans next to the register. If a thirsty customer didn't have an empty for the bin, Spell said, the clerk charged an extra dime for a drink as a deposit on the container.
Spell is convinced that deposits reduce littering. "When we were up in New York State, you didn't see a plastic bottle on the side of the road," Spell said.
Janice Albert, Cumberland County's recycling coordinator, said she is educating haulers as they educate customers about the new law.
Most plastic bottles, with the exception of those that held motor oil or pesticides, are subject to the ban. Albert said the county will hold off on fines for now.
So how many of Spell's Cumberland County customers, living outside of Fayetteville with no curbside recycling pickup, are separating their bottles and cans for him?
"There's a lot of nice people out there," Spell said. "A lot of them are doing it."
But Spell estimated 20 percent refuse to stop throwing bottles in the trash.
"Some of them don't seem to want to do it," he said. "It kind of puts the pressure on us."
Those who don't throw their bottles into the trash would have to take them to one of the county's recycling centers.
http://www.fayobserver.com/Articles/2009/10/09/941564
