April 6, 2007
State bottle bill expansion passes Senate committee
Plastic water bottles could be recycled in 2009
BETH CASPER
Aquafina. Dasani. Arrowhead. Kirkland.
Take these and other water bottles back to the store in 2009 and you will get a nickel back, if the bottle bill passed out of a Senate committee Thursday becomes law.
Senate Bill 707 -- in negotiation for the past several weeks -- expands Oregon's bottle bill to include water bottles and allow people to take them back almost anywhere, not just to the store that sold the beverage.
It also creates a task force to find a way to increase the 5-cent deposit, add more beverages, such as sports drinks and iced teas, and reduce grocers' burden of handling the material by setting up separate redemption centers.
"It's a great step forward for Oregon to get water bottles in the bottle bill and a system to get them out of grocery stores," said Rep. Vicki Berger, R-Salem. She has championed the issue in the 2007 session, partly to continue a family legacy. Her father is known as the impetus behind the original 1971 bottle bill.
The bill also allows small stores -- those less than 5,000 square feet in size -- to refuse to accept more than 50 containers from an individual a day.
But that doesn't appease the big grocery stores that take back the majority of the containers, and in many cases, far more bottles than they sell.
Gary Oxley, who represents Fred Meyer and Safeway stores, called the the addition of water bottles "impossible" for the stores to handle.
"The unintended consequences are that you could potentially implode the existing bottle bill," he said.
Sen. Roger Beyer, R-Molalla, and Sen. Jason Atkinson, R-Grants Pass, voted against the bill partly because of the burden it places on grocery stores.
Recycling advocates, who originally had pushed a bill to include almost all beverage containers, celebrated the bill's step forward.
"Oregonians want the bottle bill, and they want the bottle bill to reflect what they are drinking," said Katy Daily of Recycling Advocates.
She said grocers have plenty of time to respond to the addition of water bottles because the bill is not effective until January 2009.
Other proponents said the update is not a sudden and unreasonable request.
"Legislators and groups like OSPIRG have been trying for 30 years to do just that," said Jeremiah Baumann of the consumer-advocacy group, Oregon State Public Interest Research Group. "It is very important to just expand containers."
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality estimates that 62 percent of water bottles would be redeemed for a deposit if they were added to the current bottle bill. The estimates are rough, and based on bottles that contain uncarbonated plain water, not flavored water products.
That's a lower return rate than beer and soft drinks, which see a 78.5 percent return rate.
Sen. Brad Avakian, D-Portland, convened four workgroup meetings this session to work out an agreement for a bill, and he expects the task force to address some of the grocers' problems with adding containers.
"This is an extremely difficult issue to work through," he said at the hearing. "But I see it as a tremendous step for Oregon."
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