January 10, 2005
Bottle bill: Scrap it or expand it?
Erik Arvidson, Eagle Boston Bureau
BOSTON -- Twenty-two years ago, the bottle bill was seen as the ideal litter-busting solution: Mandate a 5-cent deposit on all beer and soda containers, and people will feel personally invested in recycling. But today, many state lawmakers are finding fewer redeeming qualities to the bill and want to send it to the scrap heap.
The problem is the explosion in the beverages market for single-serve drinks such as bottled water and for juices such as Snapple, which are not addressed by the bottle bill because they didn't exist in 1982.
At the same time, municipalities throughout Massachusetts have stronger recycling programs than they did two decades ago, with homeowners having the option of leaving their redeemable containers in a colored bin on the curb.
"The bottle bill is a highly inefficient way to deal with recycling litter," said state Sen. Robert A. O'Leary, D-Barnstable. "It's an incredibly expensive program with not a lot of public benefit. It's getting more expensive, as the value of the nickel is less, and people have less of an incentive to recycle."
O'Leary is one of several legislators who have proposed eliminating the 5-cent deposit. He would replace it with a so-called "litter tax," in which a modest fee would be charged to distributors of all kinds of recyclable products, including all cans and bottles, newspapers, cigarettes, plastic and even automobile tires.
The revenue from the fee would go to a special state fund, from which grants would be made to cities and towns to boost their local recycling programs.
The fee would be based on a fraction of a percentage of the distributor's gross production. O'Leary acknowledged that the distributors would simply pass the fee on to consumers, but it would still be much smaller than the current 5-cent deposit.
"We ought to spread the burden more evenly and push back this responsibility to the producer," O'Leary said.
Supporters of doing away with the bottle deposit note that municipal recycling programs have become stronger over the past 10 years, and that the majority of cities and towns have higher recycling rates.
Each year, about $110 million is paid by beverage consumers in bottle bill deposits, while about $35 million worth of bottles and cans are not redeemed. That money goes into the state's general fund, and bottle bill opponents argue that the system is a back-door tax on consumers.
"It has nothing to do with the environment. It has to do with revenues," said Barbara Anderson, executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation. "It has to do with these stores collecting revenues for the state at great inconvenience to the store owners."
Supporters of the bottle bill stress that the law needs to be updated, but that it has resulted in Massachusetts achieving much higher recycling rates than other states.
Jenny Gitlitz, a Pittsfield resident who is research director for the Virginia-based Container Research Institute, said the bottle bill would work more effectively if it included more types of containers.
Gitlitz supports a bill being sponsored by state Sen. Andrea F. Nuciforo Jr., D-Pittsfield, that would expand the bill to include noncarbonated beverages, bottled water, wine and liquor.
"When the bottle bill was enacted, these noncarbonated beverages, sports drinks, herbal teas, didn't exist. These beverages are now 25 percent of the entire market. There has been an increasing pressure on municipalities to handle the growing volume of these containers," she said.
Gitlitz said the litter tax proposed by O'Leary would create a state-administered recycling fund but "doesn't create a recycling infrastructure" and doesn't help towns lacking a recycling program to start one.
She said that Massachusetts' recycling rate is between 80 percent and 85 percent of containers sold, while the national recycling average is about 44 percent. Eleven states have a bottle deposit law.
During the last session, Gov. Mitt Romney proposed expanding the bottle bill to include other types of beverage containers, while imposing a 15-cent deposit on wine and liquor containers.
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