April 11, 2010
Democrat Herald
Editorial
Veto prevents a bottle bill fix
The legislature in February tried to do something to improve the bottle bill. It passed a bill to authorize beverage distributors to set up redemption centers so stores would no longer have to handle empties. Gov. Ted Kulongoski now has vetoed the bill, saying it might make life harder for consumers. The bill could have been more comprehensive, but it was a start and the veto was a mistake.
How these redemption centers might work was left somewhat nebulous in the bill, HB 3704. But the idea was that you still would pay your deposit when buying beverages in cans or bottles. Then, you could take the empties to the redemption center to get your deposit back.
This would avoid standing in line at those balky machines on a drafty corner of some supermarket. Whether the redemption centers would be better would depend on how they were set up and how they were staffed. The governor thinks they would be more inconvenient than the present setup, though one wonders how much experience he has in returning empties to the store.
“My concern is that the practical impact of this bill may actually hinder consumer recycling,” he wrote in his veto letter. “The consumer will be limited in their (sic) ability to obtain a refund or credit at the neighborhood retailer. Instead, the consumer will put his or her recyclables in a bag, drive to a redemption center, wait in line to drop off the bag, receive a credit for the recyclables, and then save that credit to use at a later time or travel back to the neighborhood retailer to shop. In addition to consumer inconvenience, this recycling model would likely require the consumer to have a car, and requires more traveling to and from the redemption center, more time in traffic on our streets, more CO2 emissions, and more time away from home.”
Is he kidding? Does he think most Oregonians now walk to the supermarket to shop? Maybe he ought to get out more.
It’s true that, as the governor also said, the bottle bill needs other improvements. The redemption value of empties has to be raised to make it worthwhile for people to scour the roadsides and pick up the containers carelessly thrown there by a few slobs.
And yes, the deposit requirement ought to be expanded to more containers of the kind of now litter our roadsides.
Both steps would give homeless people and others a greater reward for policing the countryside and keeping it picked up. Recycling centers would bolster the same cause. People with big bags of empties collected from ditches could go there instead of seeking out the different markets where each can and bottle was sold.
The governor is worried that redemption centers would lead to more driving and thus more carbon dioxide in the Oregon air. If he’s so worried about the deposit law contributing to global warming, he ought to favor repealing the law and replacing it with a ban on putting beverage containers in the household trash.
That would lead to most containers being put out for curbside recycling. This would solve the container problem without further ado, though we’d have to think up another solution regarding roadside trash. (hh)
http://www.democratherald.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_6ee676dc-452c-11df-9460-001cc4c03286.html
