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Container and Packaging
Recycling UPDATE
Summer/Fall 2001 Issue

HARTFORD - Representative Richard Roy introduced legislation to expand Connecticut's beverage container deposit system. The Environment Committee Chair, Rep. Jessie Stratton, supported the bill that passed her committee by a margin of 15 to 13. It remains bottled up in the General Law Committee.

Roy called it "a victory for [beverage industry] lobbyists," and vowed to reintroduce the bill in 2002. He acknowledged that the large number of curbside recycling programs throughout the state make recycling convenient, but said "We don't capture enough of the containers there because

increasingly these beverage cans and bottles are purchased and consumed away from home and recycling bins."

A Bottle Bill Working Group, heavily laden with what Sierra Club lobbyist Betty McLaughlin calls "anti-expansion industry lobbyists", studied expansion options last summer. But the Connecticut General Assembly once again failed to act on what McLaughlin refers to as "common sense legislation." Under consideration was expansion of the state's 20-year-old, highly successful and very popular deposit law to include the sports drinks, iced teas, bottled waters, etc., that did not exist when the original law was passed in 1978.