May 7, 2009
Lawmakers want uncollected bottle deposits for state budget
SALEM -- A duo of lawmakers want the state -- not beverage distributors -- to collect the "windfall," as they call it, that results from people not redeeming their nickels on beer, soda and water bottles.
At stake are tens of millions of dollars every year. Sen. Jackie Dingfelder and Rep. Michael Dembrow, both Portland Democrats, want the money to go to the state's general fund rather than to the companies that ship the bottles to stores.
The money, they said at Thursday news conference, could be used to boost awareness of recycling programs, as well as help pay for unrelated state programs that could be slashed because of falling state income tax revenues.
"Currently this money is a windfall for to the beverage distributors," Dingfelder said.
Despite the legendary success of Oregon's bottle bill in upping recycling rates, millions of containers still end up in landfills, or are recycled curbside instead of at the grocery store. That results in $20-30 million a year in deposits that are paid by consumers, but not redeemed later, according to an analysis by the state Department of Environmental Quality.
Under current law, those unredeemed deposits go to individual distributors or, increasingly, to cooperatives that distributors belong to. Portland lobbyist Paul Romain, who represents the distributors, says the money covers the cost of collecting the bottles. It also will be used to set up a series of redemption centers so people can take their bottles and cans there instead of back to the supermarket.
Picking up empty bottles is expensive, Romain said. And the system has worked for more than three decades that the bottle bill has been in place.
"I've been trying to understand the frustration that Dingfelder has with the most successful environmental program we have in the state of Oregon," Romain said. "There must be some kind of visceral hatred for any program that's successful without government involvement."
The timing of Dingfelder's and Dembrow's proposal has raised some questions. Earlier this week, the House voted for a second time to stall efforts to further expand the bottle bill to include a variety of other containers.
Talk among Capitol insiders was that the redemption bill was introduce to pressure opponents of the bottle bill expansion. Dingfelder rejected that speculation Thursday.
Dembrow said their bill, which gets its first hearing Monday, also requires distributors to report details on how much money they get from unredeemed cans and bottles. "Distributors frequently promise transparency, but I have seen no evidence of that," Dembrow said.
Romain acknowledged that distributors have never liked the bottle bill and would be happy if it just went away. "It's a pain," he said. "But we decided years ago to stop complaining and make it work." He said he suspects Dingfelder and Dembrow introduced the bill to give more leverage to the expansion effort.
"It's politics," he said. "We're used to it."
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/05/lawmakers_want_uncollected_bot.html
