April 4, 2007

Opinion

A s a story last week in The Oregonian noted, the bottle bill is "fightin' words" for grocers. That includes me. But what I'm fighting for is our environment and for the livability of our communities.

Collecting returnable bottles and cans is definitely a hassle for grocers. But since we sell the drinks in the first place, it seems to me that we have the greatest responsibility to make certain the bottles don't end up in Oregon's landfills.

The story quoted Joe Gilliam, a lobbyist for the Oregon Grocery Association (an organization that New Seasons Market resigned from last year because it puts its own narrow interests before the community's) as saying: "We can sit back and kill bottle bills. We've got the money to do it. We've got the political know-how to do it." He also said, "I think it's a pretty fair guess to say that Oregonians will hate the bill. . . . It will expose them to health hazards they won't accept."

Well, I couldn't disagree more.

Oregon's current law is 35 years old, and while it was groundbreaking in 1971, it desperately needs to be updated. First, the nickel deposit isn't as much of a motivation to return bottles as it used to be. But even more importantly, the existing law doesn't include most plastic bottles. As a result, a large number of plastic juice, tea and water bottles just get tossed away. According to the state Department of Environmental Quality, Oregonians threw away about 125 million empty water bottles in 2005. That's just plain crazy and a waste of a valuable resource.

It's true that dealing with bottle refunds is a bit of a logistical nightmare for supermarkets. At each store someone has to take the returns back from customers and deal with sorting them. Grocers also must find a place to keep the empties until the distributor picks them up, which means that at any given moment a store may have up to 30 huge plastic bags piled up in a storeroom.

But the argument that accepting the returns is virtually impossible or somehow creates new food safety risks is simply self-serving and disingenuous.

At New Seasons Market we're standing up for the quality of life we all expect in Oregon, and we encourage others to join us by supporting expansion of the bottle bill. When you consider the current alternatives, the choice is clear.

As former Gov. Tom McCall might have said, not updating our recycling standards is a "shameless threat to our environment."

Brian Rohter is co-founder and chief executive officer of New Seasons Market.

http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1175644538198530.xml&coll=7