April 4, 2007
Legislators scale back plans for bottle bill
By David Steves
SALEM - Lawmakers are narrowing down their proposed overhaul of the bottle bill, adding water bottles while keeping the deposit at a nickel and leaving out of the mix millions of bottles for sports drinks, juices, teas and other noncarbonated drinks.
Sen. Brad Avakian, chairman of the committee overseeing the bottle bill legislation, said he plans to have the amended version of Senate Bill 707 ready for a floor vote Thursday.
The Portland Democrat said advocates' more ambitious goals - raising the deposit to a dime per container, creating redemption centers outside grocery stores, and including other noncarbonated drink containers besides those for drinking water - aren't dead; they're just being deferred to an interim task force so it can make more informed recommendations to the next Legislature in 2009.
But considering that Oregon's first-in-the-nation bottle bill has been unchanged since its 1971 adoption, backers weren't critical of the more modest reform efforts now in the works.
"Overall, it's a very good bill," said Jeremiah Baumann of the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group. "It would be a very historic vote for the Legislature to expand the bottle bill for the first time in 36 years."
Currently, the bottle bill adds a nickel to the price of beer, soda and other carbonated beverage containers.
They can then be redeemed for the return of that nickel - by the original consumer or anyone who collects them - at a grocery store's bottle-return department.
Containers covered by the bottle bill are recycled at an 83 percent rate, according to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. Those that aren't covered are recycled at a rate of 36 percent.
Bringing in only water bottles would leave about 328 million discarded drinking bottles outside the bottle bill purview.
Given the DEQ's estimated recycling rate of 38 percent for these noncarbonated, non- drinking-water containers, that would amount to about 202 million bottles drained of their wine, milk, sports drink, juice, liquor or iced tea that get thrown in garbage cans - not to mention the millions more littered on beaches or along rivers and roadsides - instead of being recycled.
Lynn Lundquist, the former Republican House speaker who now heads the Oregon Business Association, said even including only water bottles represents genuine progress.
"That is a win. We ought to relish in that," said Lundquist, who helped lead a behind- the-scenes work group of business, industry and environmental advocates who tried unsuccessfully to reach consensus on a bottle-bill overhaul they all could support.
According to the DEQ, of the 186 million empty water bottles that get tossed each year, 61 million bottles are recycled.
The DEQ estimates that figure would rise to 126 million under the proposed expansion.
One provision of the new version of the bill meant to win the grocery store lobby's support would reduce the number of returned containers per-person/per-day from 144 to 50 at retailers with a square footage of less than 5,000 - meant to apply to convenience stores.
But Joe Gilliam, president of the Northwest Grocery Association, said stores already have too many cans and bottles piling up without bringing on more by adding water bottles.
He described unsanitary messes in grocery stores that result from the thousands of cans and bottles they must accept from people. Some are filled with spit-out chewing tobacco.
Others contain cigarette butts, syringes and even human waste, he said.
"We'd like to see the delay of an expansion until they work out a plan to get the garbage out of the stores and away from the food," he said.
State analysts estimate that if water bottles are added to the bottle bill, they would account for only nine out of every 100 containers redeemed at grocery stores.
But Gilliam said they would take up a much greater area of floor space, since bottles tend to be larger than beer and pop cans and don't crush flat.
Avakian, the Environment and Natural Resources Committee chairman overseeing the bottle bill overhaul, said despite the continued opposition from some in the bottling and grocery industries, he was satisfied with the compromise represented by the new version of SB 707.
And while some groups, such as the bottlers and distributors and the grocery manufacturers, continue to have problems with the bill, Avakian singled out grocery-store operators as the most difficult to satisfy.
"For some of the grocers, I don't know if there is a solution," he said. "They simply want to repeal the bottle bill."
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