1998
Duck Soup
Millions for defenses but not one damned nickel
for deposit
by C.L. Bothwell III
While
most communities have started recycling programs, and many individuals
expend considerable personal effort to recycle their household trash,
recycling rates for most materials have made only slight increases
over the past six years, and plastic soda bottle recycling is on
the decline. Even the
recycling rate for aluminum cans, the gold in our trash bins, is
lower today than it was in 1992. Millions of tons of valuable resources will go to the dump
again this year. Doesn't
that seem a little perverse? How can we be failing when folks are working so hard?
Organizing a recycling effort takes time -- whether it is as modest as the trash in your kitchen or as complicated as urban curbside collection. Convincing folks to participate can be difficult too. Rinsing containers, removing lids, and sorting plastics by number code can look like an unnecessary hassle to folks who don't understand the enormity of our environmental woes. Actually re-using the materials that are collected may require that industries change their methods, rearrange supply schedules, and educate their customers.
One simple answer to the problem is a national bottle bill, which would guarantee that 75-85 percent of the 150 billion single-serve beverage containers that we purchase each year in the U. S. would be recycled. It would not help with paper recycling but would zero in on most of the glass bottles, all of the aluminum cans and a sizable portion of the plastic bottles.
Today only ten states have bottle/can deposit laws, and those ten states recycle more beverage containers than the other forty combined. It doesn't take a software developer to figure out that the deposits might be making a difference. And, surprise! surprise! The roadsides, parking lots and beaches in those ten states are cleaner as well.
If there is a glaring glitch in the patchwork of current laws it lies in the differences from state to state. Deposit amounts vary, and some laws cover all beverage containers while most cover only beer and soft drinks. Some states include liquor bottles and one state exempts aluminum cans.
A uniform federal bottle bill will iron out the differences and move the whole country toward a more sustainable future. Representative Tom Allen, of Maine, has introduced The National Beverage Container and Recycling Act in Congress. Using Maine's highly successful program as a model, it would impose a 5-cent deposit on all beer, soft drink, wine, liquor and new age beverages, including teas, sports drinks, juice drinks and bottled water.
The opposition to this little snippet of environmental sanity is fierce. The Container Recycling Institute reports that Coke and Pepsi are not only fighting such federal legislation, but are working hard to end deposit programs in the ten states that now have them. Both the American Plastics Council and the National Association of Plastic Container Recovery are firmly opposed to deposit laws. Another trade group, the Glass Packaging Institute, has gone so far as to warn wineries that refilling of wine bottles may be hazardous -- somehow conveniently ignoring the hundreds of millions of beer bottles safely re-used every year.
There is simply no excuse for the wealthiest nation on the planet, which uses an embarrassingly disproportionate share of the world's resources, to continue to support needless waste. And surely single-serve beverage containers, which cost much more than the product they deliver, are among the most wasteful package on the market.
As soft drink manufacturers switch from glass or aluminum to plastic, and with breweries poised to do the same, the amount of plastic headed for the dump will soon snowball without a national recycling plan. Isn't it odd that we are willing and ready to fight wars over oil, one of the major feedstocks for the plastics industry, and so resistant to conservation? Do we really prefer body bags to bottle bills?
To paraphrase South Carolinian Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, it's "millions for defense, but not one damned nickel for deposit."
Duck Soup is served up twice every Tuesday on WNCW-88.7FM. Still hungry? Email TBE SOUPLETTER: [email protected]. Copyright 1998, Cecil L. Bothwell III, All rights reserved. 300 Rush Creek Road, 28711 USA
