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A effort to bottle-up litter
By Peter B. Lord, NATALIE GARCIA

Wolfgang Braendle lugs a bag of plastic bottles to a recycling center in Los Angeles. He can redeem small containers for 5 cents and larger ones for 10.
TPN / MARK BOSTER

It’s back.

A bottle bill, a divisive issue that legislators battled over for years without ever approving, is once again on the General Assembly’s agenda.

Things have changed in the six or so years since the General Assembly last contemplated a bottle bill. Connecticut and Massachusetts are considering expanding their bottle-redemption laws. We all use a lot more bottles. And many of us throw them away.

According to the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, the agency that runs the state Central Landfill, in Johnston, Rhode Islanders bought 614 million beverage containers in 2005 that would qualify under the proposed legislation.

Of the beverage containers Resource Recovery tracks, only about a third of them get recycled, said corporation recycling manager Sarah Kite.

If the bottle bill passes, customers will pay a nickel for nearly every beverage container they buy. The bottles’ cost could be redeemed at large retail stores and state-run redemption centers.

The bill covers glass, plastic and aluminum containers that hold carbonated and noncarbonated drinks from 8 ounces to 5 gallons, regardless of alcohol content.

Senate Majority Leader Teresa Paiva Weed, D-Newport, the bill’s lead sponsor, says her intent is to round out a comprehensive recycling overhaul focused on cutting down on waste.

“The bigger issue is that beverage containers comprise 40 to 50 percent of litter,” Paiva Weed said. “I think this legislation is good because it’s part of a bigger conversation.”

Statewide municipal recycling has failed to reach goals set more than a decade ago and lingers around 15 percent of municipal waste. The Central Landfill, where all the state’s garbage goes, is expected to fill up in two years, forcing a $70-million expansion.

Paiva Weed has made recycling a legislative priority this year.

In January, she helped host the first Senate Recycling Summit, a hearing to update legislators on the state’s current recycling efforts. A month later, she and a handful of state senators toured the Central Landfill.

Despite the bottle bill’s contentiousness, she said, it was worth addressing at the State House. In the past, bottlers and owners of small retailers, such as liquor stores, objected to the legislation.

“I have been in the legislature for a long time and there is no bottle bill,” Paiva Weed said. “I knew it would be controversial, but I thought we should look at it again.”

The bill, S2771, has been referred to the Committee on Environment and Agriculture. No hearings have been scheduled.

To avoid a past concern of small businesses, Paiva Weed said they would not be required to collect empty bottles. Resource Recovery would set the minimum size of retailers required to accept beverage containers.

Kite, of Resource Recovery, said that the corporation had not established that size, but it would target large retailers such as supermarkets and big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Target.

Even with concessions, some think a bottle law is misguided and would put Rhode Island businesses at a competitive disadvantage.

State Rep. Jan Malik, D-Warren, owns a liquor store and also chairs the House Committee on the Environment and Natural Resources. He opposes a bottle bill.

He said a redemption law would hurt stores in cities and towns that border Massachusetts, such as Warren, Tiverton and Pawtucket, because Rhode Islanders would have to pay 5 cents per bottle plus the existing 7-percent state sales tax.

Massachusetts has a 5-cent redemption law, but no sales tax on liquor.

The bill would add $1.20 to the price of a case of beer, and Malik worries that the extra cost would provoke customers to cross state lines to buy alcohol.

“When I heard about a bottle bill, I was shocked,” he said. “It just seems that every year [the General Assembly is] taking away something from business.”

Malik says he already pays $125 a year for a state “litter-control participation permit.” Proceeds from that tax should be used to collect any bottles and cans that end up on the streets, he added.

He also said targeting drinking containers would not be the most effective way to improve recycling, because such containers are already collected through municipal programs. Instead, he favors looking at other waste-producing sectors such as restaurants, which rarely recycle.

“We need to target those who are not recycling right now,” Malik said.

The most current data available from Resource Recovery puts the statewide commercial recycling rate at 4 percent.

In 2005, each American used an average of 676 one-time-use beverage containers a year, almost a three-fold increase since 1970, according to the Container Recycling Institute, a Washington-based, nonprofit that supports bottle bills in the United States and abroad.

Eleven states –– including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine and New York –– have enacted bottle bills in the last 30 years. Oregon, in 1972, was the first to enforce a law.

A study by the institute in 1999 found that states with redemption laws recycled 491 containers per person. Residents of states that did not recycled an average of 191 containers.

Because of how the Central Landfill separates recyclable materials, a statewide beverage-container recycling rate is unknown, but the agency can offer a sample of Rhode Island’s recycling habits.

The corporation recycles about 2,800 tons of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, plastic a year, which consists largely of water bottles, sports-drink containers and two-litter bottles of soda. Resource Recovery estimates that tonnage accounts for about 31 percent of PET beverage containers bought in the state, which means several thousand tons of plastic drink bottles end up taking up space in the landfill or in the streets as litter. Some may get recycled fraudulently in Massachusetts or Connecticut, but experts say that the percentages are fairly low.

Rhode Island and New Hampshire are the only New England states that do not have bottle bills, a vexing problem for the other Northeast states. Those states lose millions of dollars to fraud from border-crossing bottle collectors who take advantage of the different regional laws.

Rhode Island for years has imposed a “beverage tax” of 4 cents on every case of carbonated soft drinks, beer and malt liquor. In 2005, according to a Department of Environmental Management report, the tax raised $1.6 million.

About $300,000 of that revenue goes to the state Departments of Corrections and Transportation to defray the costs of inmates cleaning up litter along state highways.

Years ago, some of the revenues financed litter campaigns by the DEM. But those have been discontinued, so now all the remaining revenues go into the state’s general fund.

It’s hard to judge the chances for this year’s bottle bill.

Neither the DEM, nor Environment Rhode Island, an advocacy group, identified the bottle bill as a legislative priority, though spokesmen at both said they would support a bottle bill.

DEM chief of staff Robert Ballou said the bottle bill in past years was an interesting issue, but it lost traction with legislators. He said this was as good a time as any to bring it back up.

Matt Auten, of Environment Rhode Island, said the bill would be good for Rhode Island, but that such bills get “strong push back” from the bottling industry.

“Massachusetts and Connecticut are both pushing to expand their programs to noncarbonated and carbonated beverages,” Auten said.What the bill calls for:

• Consumers will pay a fee of no less than five cents for plastic, glass and aluminum beverage containers that will be redeemable upon return of the bottles to a redemption center.

• Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation will be authorized to own and operate statewide redemption centers.

• Large retailers will host reverse vending machines at certain “qualified dealer locations” (determined by RIRRC based on set square footage of the retailer).

• Allow the corporation to collect unclaimed deposits, of which 75 percent will go to the state treasury for the state’s general fund; 25 percent stays with the corporation to support municipal and commercial recycling programs.

• Effective date: July 1, 2009

http://www.projo.com/generalassembly/Bottlebill_04-14-08_M09L0GG_v35.313b550.html