Editorial

Bottle impasse has an answer

The legislature this session has tried to reform the Oregon Bottle Bill, so far without luck. It might want to give up and try a different approach the next time it gets a chance.

The 1971 deposit law still has the reputation of being useful because it keeps soft drink and beer bottles and cans out of the trash. But it is also a nuisance, and is increasingly being ignored.

Ignored to what extent? Well, the Department of Environmental Quality estimates that $20 million-$30 million in bottle and can deposits goes unclaimed each year.

That’s between 400 million and 600 million containers on which we pay deposits but which we don’t return to the store.

Where do all those containers go? Some may go in the trash, and a few end up in ditches. But a lot of them also go in the recycling containers that households in just about every Oregon community now have.

In the early days, returnable bottles could sometimes be used more than once. Remember buying Coke in glass bottles that looked as though they had gone around a few times?

Now, though, the only point of the bottle law is to keep containers out of the waste stream. Aluminum and plastic containers are melted down and become parts of other products.

How about a nuisance?

Sometimes the bottles you buy at a particular store are refused by the machines at that very store. Somebody forgot to program the device.

Another time you stand there there feeding your 2-liter pop bottles into the maw of the apparatus. But it spits back every third one with a message that it can’t read the bar code. Well, machine, whose problem is that?

You take the rejects to the checkstand where, understandably they can’t deal with them and also don’t want the mess. They offer to call somebody who might or might not be able to help back at the bottle return.

So you can troop back there and spend another five minutes of your life — which is short enough without all this pointless aggravation about some stupid bottles.

“I haven’t found the time yet to read ‘The Iliad’ all the way to the end,” you are likely to think, “and I’m standing here waiting for a clerk to count my bottles so I can get back 50 cents?”

There has to be a better way, an answer that would allow the legislature either to leave the Bottle Bill alone, to let it age gracefully, or to scrap it altogether.

The answer is in commingled recycling, to which our state and communities are committed regardless of whether it pays off economically (which at the moment it doesn’t, according to Allied Waste’s application for a trash-hauling rate hike in Albany).

We rely on curbside and commingled recycling to dispose of most of the other recyclable stuff in our lives, so why not rely on it for drink containers of all kinds as well?

We recycle newspapers and cardboard boxes without a deposit. Why can’t Oregonians be trusted to do the same with bottles and cans? (hh)

http://www.democratherald.com/articles/2009/06/21/news/opinion/1edi01_hasso_bottlebill_062109.txt