Coming up dry on bottles: Law change would let consumers redeem water, juice containers

Boston Globe, March 24, 2008

The Boston Globe reports in this article by David Abel about the need to expand current recycling laws to cover water, juice, tea, energy and sports drink containers.

• Between 2002 and 2005, Americans more than doubled the amount of bottled water they drank, from 13 billion bottles to 29.8 billion, according to the Container Recycling Institute, a Washington-based group that monitors the recycling of bottles. And that doesn't include the proliferation of drinks such as Snapple, Gatorade, and Red Bull. The institute estimated in 2005 that 144 billion containers, more than one-third of them plastic bottles, ended up in incinerators, landfills, or as litter.

• Last year, when US Representative Edward J. Markey filed the national bottle bill in Congress, he said the proposed law would help recycle some 100 billion bottles around the country that are now either littered or incinerated. He said recycling more plastic bottles would lead to savings in energy and oil consumption, noting that every ton of recycled plastic saves about 685 gallons of oil.

• "Bottle bills have succeeded in cleaning up litter in our parks, playgrounds, and streets, and now a national bottle bill would also clean up heat-trapping pollution in our atmosphere," Markey said in a statement.

Boston Globe

Coming up dry on bottles
Law change would let consumers redeem water, juice containers
By David Abel, Globe Staff  |  March 24, 2008

Standing over a grocery cart full of empty Budweiser bottles and Coke cans, James Williams walked to a trash barrel outside a South End redemption center, pulled out a few empty plastic water bottles, and shrugged.
"My question is: Why in the world can't you redeem these, when you could if it had bubbles inside?" asked Williams, 63, a Dorchester resident who has spent years rifling through dumpsters, tossing aside countless plastic water and juice bottles. "It makes no sense. We're passing up thousands of dollars. It would help the homeless and empty lots of trash from landfills."
With a staggering proliferation of plastic bottles and declining recycling rates in Massachusetts and nationwide, Williams's question is increasingly asked, and vehemently debated, from Beacon Hill to Capitol Hill. The state's 27-year-old bottling law is, according to some lawmakers and environmentalists, woefully out of date. The law allows consumers to redeem 5 cents for bottles and cans of soda, beer, malt beverages, and mineral water, but it doesn't allow for the return of noncarbonated bottles of water, iced tea, juices, or energy drinks, which now account for about one-third of all beverages sold in Massachusetts.
Now, after years of opposition from groups representing retailers, distributors, and beverage companies, state lawmakers are pushing a bill that would expand the law in Massachusetts to cover the other drinks and raise the redemption fee by a nickel to 10 cents to adjust for inflation since the original law passed. Lawmakers pushing the bill say it would improve recycling rates for bottles and cans, and generate more than $50 million in state revenue from uncollected deposits, $15 million more than the current law. With only 11 states having passed bottle-redemption laws like the one in Massachusetts, lawmakers in Congress are considering a similar bill that would allow soda, water, and other beverage bottles to be redeemed in every state.
Between 2002 and 2005, Americans more than doubled the amount of bottled water they drank, from 13 billion bottles to 29.8 billion, according to the Container Recycling Institute, a Washington-based group that monitors the recycling of bottles. And that doesn't include the proliferation of drinks such as Snapple, Gatorade, and Red Bull. The institute estimated in 2005 that 144 billion containers, more than one-third of them plastic bottles, ended up in incinerators, landfills, or as litter.
"Not including bottled water in the law is insane," said Representative Alice Wolf, a Cambridge Democrat who sponsored the bill. "That's why we're going to change the law. The legislative process can take a while, but we want action. We know it's the right thing to do."

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