Who’s behind www.tnbottlebill.com?
By Marge Davis, PhD, Coordinator
Tennessee Bottle Bill Project
When Tennessee legislators and citizens launched a bottle bill campaign last spring, they fully expected opposition from the beverage and grocery industries. They even expected some subdued grousing from the state affiliate of Keep America Beautiful (KAB) since Keep Tennessee Beautiful (KTB) gets a large share of its funding from the beverage distributors through a pair of specialty taxes on beer and soft drinks. But even the most seasoned observers have been a little surprised by the vehemence of the KTB response.
The board of Keep Blount Beautiful, for instance, has taken a position opposing the proposed bottle bill, while the executive director of Keep Knoxville Beautiful has publicly questioned not only the merits of the bill, but also the ethics of its supporters. And now, there’s www.tnbottlebill.com.
If the name sounds familiar, it should. It’s a knockoff of the bottle bill supporters’ own website, www.tnbottlebill.org. The information it contains ranges from the questionable (“take-out food packaging is the largest single type of item found in litter”) to the flat-out wrong (“the bottle bill will eliminate an existing program that cleans up litter in every Tennessee county”.) Though it’s true that the two specialty taxes will be eliminated, the proposed bill will replace that funding—in fact will more than double it!—with $10 million of the unclaimed deposits
What is most below-board about this site is its ownership. It’s supposedly the work of a group called “Citizens for a Fair Hearing on the Tennessee Bottle Bill”, but there’s no contact name, phone number, or email address. The only way to contact them is through an online feedback form.
A “WHOIS” search for the registrant of record revealed only that the site had been registered through a proxy domain service. But thanks to a member of CRI’s Bottle Bill Action Network who knows his HTML, we learned that the site is registered to none other than Keep Knoxville Beautiful’s executive director, Tom Salter. (In fact, Salter sent a congratulatory feedback to the www.tnbottlebill.com website, saying “thanks for putting this website together”!)
Now we know that KTB is behind the knockoff website. But we’ve always known who’s behind KTB and other Keep America Beautiful affiliates. It’s none other than the beverage producers themselves--Coke, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch--and a host of other corporate giants who oppose bottle bills because they don’t want the cost of recycling to eat into their profits.
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