February 17, 2007

Opinion

State's bottle bill needs a 21st-century update
New legislation must be passed to boost recycling

Oregon was ahead of the times in 1971, when our state passed the nation's first bottle bill. This legislative session, lawmakers should bring the bill up to date by raising the deposit and greatly expanding the kinds of containers covered.

Far-seeing though they were, lawmakers of the '70s neglected to require a deposit for wine bottles and juice bottles, among others. What's more, those legislators never could have imagined the way plastic containers would take over our lives.

We swig green tea, iced tea, milk, fruit juice, sports drinks and protein shakes from plastic bottles. Above all, we chug plain old water -- stuff we got free from a tap back in the '70s -- enough to send 34 bottles to dumps yearly for every Oregonian.

A use-it, toss-it mentality seems to have grown alongside this plastic revolution. Oregonians recycle only about one-fourth of our rigid plastic containers, down from about 30 percent in 1995. Bottles are clogging our landfills; they're going up in smoke at the Brooks trash burner. We're degrading our home for a little convenience.

The best way to change that is to turn plastic bottles into something too valuable to toss. A couple of bills under development at the Legislature would raise the basic deposit for containers from a nickel to a dime apiece. That makes sense.

Soft-drink and water bottlers disagree. If the state is bent out of shape about falling below the 25 percent recycling benchmark, they say, just change the rules. Don't count the plastic bottles that get caught by mistake in pallets of recycled paper, because that isn't the manufacturer's fault. Or find other ways to make the numbers work to the manufacturer's favor, because any effort to change the rules will backfire on consumers.

Well, we don't buy it. Oregonians may have gotten complacent, but we aren't ready to lower the bar on environmental standards.

Rep. Vicki Berger, R-Salem, is championing the new bottle bill. That's fitting, because her father, Richard Chambers, was the driving force behind the original bill.

Credit Berger with walking her talk. She doesn't buy a bottle of water whenever she needs a drink. She drinks water the old-fashioned way, getting it from faucets and drinking fountains and carrying water with her.

That's an example worth following. Let's recover that old Oregon spirit of setting the pace instead of bringing up the rear.

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