Letter to the Editor

Dumping beer cans should draw fines

Editor, the Tribune: I am responding to the recent news article about the Columbia sanitation workers who lost their jobs salvaging some discarded beer. I’ve received calls from friends and relatives from all over the country who heard the item when it was reported on NPR news.

The question most of them have asked is, “Doesn’t your town have an aluminum recycling program?”

That seems to be the real crime in this case: that a beer distributor is allowed to dump 36,000 aluminum cans in our landfill without a fine. That sort of dumping fills our landfill up faster, costing the city more money when we have to cap that cell and secure the state and federal permits to open a new one.

I remember when Columbia’s beverage container deposit ordinance was defeated. The N.H. Scheppers Distributing Co. put a lot of money behind defeating the ordinance. Its position was that it supported voluntary approaches to recycling.

Many of us suspected Scheppers didn’t really care about recycling, our community or how much it costs the taxpayers to open each new cell of a landfill. Obviously our voluntary recycling program isn’t working. Beer and soda distributors won’t care about recycling unless it costs them money not to. There should be hefty fines for dumping of such high-quality recyclable materials.

H.W. Clark

http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/apr/27/dumping-beer-cans-should-draw-fines/