March 20, 2009
Opinion
Bottle bill leaves state searching
Well, it seems like a long time ago since overly optimistic -- water metaphorists might say diluted -- lawmakers decided to accelerate the time that an expansion of the nickel-deposit law, to include water bottles, would take effect.
Ready for it to commence on April 1, as required by the bill signed into law by Gov. M. Jodi Rell?
Ready for those newly valued water bottles to miraculously disappear from their winter nesting spots in your front hedges?
Not so fast, my little pretties, as the Wicked Witch of the Waters might say.
Rell's budget office, the Office of Policy and Management, led by Secretary Bob Genuario, responding to an industry-wide uproar from manufacturers and retailers, last week quietly granted about 40 waivers of the new law, essentially negating the Legislature's vote.
"The secretary has recognized the undue hardship that the public act would have created on certain businesses," OPM spokesman Jeff Beckham told me last week.
So now, water bottles won't come under the 31-year-old deposit law until Oct. 1, at the earliest.
That means the $3.8 million the state anticipated collecting from unredeemed deposits -- aptly called escheats -- during the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, and $4.3 million that would
be generated between July and October, won't happen after all.
It was a typical, nearly preordained consequence of state lawmakers who remain bogged down in the denial phase on the need to tackle a multibillion-dollar budget deficit.
In their stumbling attempts to get to a bottom line based more on new revenue than tough budget cuts and escape their Feb. 25 session, the Democratic majority overlooked the massive logistical problems the April 1 deadline created.
It takes months and months to print up new labels and UPC bar codes on those 24-packs of water, much of which are bottled in out of state locations as far as, yes, Fiji.
A similar law that took effect in Oregon on Jan. 1, was originally voted by that state's lawmakers back in 2007.
Chain supermarkets in Connecticut, in a panic over the April 1 date, were planning to discontinue sales of water under their own labels.
Fortunately, someone back in February inserted the language allowing for the waiver of the April 1 deadline, essentially consigning the legislation to the feel-good variety until well after the start of the next fiscal year July 1.
The whole exercise seems counterintuitive, but it gives you a snapshot of your government at work.
On the one hand, the bill would address the 500 million water bottles sold in the state each year. The nickel value would supposedly take them off the streets as litter and get them back into the retailers and redemption centers, which would sell them to North American makers of things like fleece pullovers and such.
And yet the expansion of the bottle bill was sold as a way to create millions of dollars in revenue from the people too lazy, infirm or disinclined to haul the stuff back for their nickels.
Your average half-liter water bottle contains about 14 grams of plastic, exactly half an ounce. Of the 3.5 million tons of waste collected annually by the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority, about 7,200 tons are water bottles, a fifth of 1 percent of the total.
The CRRA sells the stuff at $80 to $100 a ton.
If, come Oct. 1, by some miracle of consumer dedication and scouring of hedges, the recycling compliance of water bottles reaches 100 percent, CRRA loses as much as $720,000 in income.
But Connecticut's recycling odyssey is much more complicated than that. Until only a few months ago, the beverage industry -- soda and beer -- never reported the amount they made on the unredeemed deposits from the lazy/disinclined that made it into blue curbside bins and then places like the CRRA's Stratford recycling center.
The CRRA estimates that as much as 30 percent of redeemable containers end up in curbside recycling.
It was one of those beautiful things the beverage lobbyists kept to themselves, with the tacit cooperation of their captives in the state House and Senate.
Finally, late last year, amid the flow of a rip tide of red ink in the state's budget, lawmakers agreed to establish a primitive reporting system to keep track of the escheats and finally snatch the consumers' money for the state's coffers.
Another part of the equation is the amount that stores and redemption centers should make for handling bottles and cans. Beer and soda containers are stinky and sticky and while water bottles are clean, they're still an added strain on recycling infrastructure.
Handlers haven't gotten a raise since the deposit law took effect in 1978, giving them 1.5 cents for each beer bottle and 2 cents for soda and -- now --water.
Industry officials say a realistic handling fee would be about 2.5 cents, slightly higher than the 2.25 cents handlers make in Massachusetts.
So where's the more than $8 million the General Assembly planned on making in the expanded bottle bill going to come from, now that it's pushed out until October?
Your guess may be better than the lawmakers who crafted this flawed bill.
http://www.connpost.com/ci_11959760?source=most_emailed
