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Testimony before the Energy Committee

Submitted by Jennifer Gitlitz, Senior Reseach Associate

Good morning, members of the Committee. My name is Jennifer Gitlitz, and I am here representing the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), located in Arlington, Virginia.. CRI is a non-profit research and public education organization that studies container and packaging recycling. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today on two bills: the repeal bill (H. 2888) and the expansion bill (H 2155).

The bottle bill in Massachusetts is a resounding recycling success; repealing it would be a big mistake. Nationwide, 70% of the population lives in states without bottle bills, and the national recycling rate for beverage containers is just under 44%. In Massachusetts, on the other hand, 72.4% of the 2 billion eligible containers sold were redeemed and recycled last year, keeping an estimated 500,000 cubic yards of debris out of the landfill, and more importantly, off the streets, parks and beaches of the Commonwealth. Were the Massachusetts bottle bill to be repealed, we could expect to see increases in bottle and can litter, leading to increased emergency room visits and higher health care and cleanup costs.

We would also see local government expected to foot more of the cost of collecting these containers through curbside programs. Container deposit legislation shifts the cost of collection and recycling away from the taxpayer and on to beverage producers and consumers.

The bottle return law is a companion system to curbside collection, serving locales where curbside is unavailable. Increasingly, beverages are being consumed on the go, away from the familiar blue bins at home. There are insufficient opportunities to recycle containers that are purchased for immediate consumption at convenience stores, in malls and stadiums, and from the growing number vending machines. The bottle bill provides a proven financial incentive to recover these immediate consumption containers.

In fact, the number of immediate consumption (away from home) containers consumed is rising in large part due to the explosive growth in the non-carbonated, or "new-age" beverage market - particularly beverages sold in plastic PET bottles. This is where the expansion bill (H 2155) comes in.

Most of the beverages covered by the expansion bill: sports drinks, bottled water, and single-serving iced tea, juice drinks, and herbal beverages were not a market presence when the Massachusetts bottle bill and nine other bottle bills across the country were enacted. These new beverage types have grown markedly in recent years, as the figure below shows. Two states, Maine and California, updated their container deposit laws to include this new category of beverages that most certainly would have been covered by the deposit had they existed when the laws were enacted.

In the five years between 1993 and 1999, the number of "new age" non-carbonated beverages sold nationally increased by almost 50%: from 23.5 to 33 billion, and they now comprise 20% of the total U.S. beverage market (35 billion of the 176 billion total units sold in 1999). Because these new age beverages are typically not included in bottle bills, they are recycled at lower rates than the national average for all beverage containers. That is to say, at rates lower than 44%. In the sports drink category alone, for example, the number of plastic and glass bottles wasted (not recycled) nationally has risen from 1.2 billion in 1992 to 2.4 billion in 1999. In Massachusetts, 20% to 25% of all beverage containers sold in 1999 (or about one out of 4 billion) were not covered by our bottle bill.

The majority of the increase in new age container waste comes from single serving plastic (PET) containers. Nationwide, plastic beverage bottle waste has almost quadrupled in seven years; from 7.8 billion bottles wasted in 1992 to 26.5 billion in 1999. Similar trends are likely to exist in Massachusetts. PET bottles are expensive to collect in curbside programs, because they have a very low weight-to-volume ratio. Were consumers to simply add these containers to the ones they are already bringing back to redeem, the financial burden on municipal curbside programs would be reduced, and recovery of away-from-home consumption would increase dramatically.

Thank you.