Vermont’s once controversial bottle deposit bill is now an accepted part of life that has kept piles of bottles off roadsides for 30 years. Since the original bottle bill, tons more plastic containers are manufactured every year for a variety of new uses and enter the plastics food-chain. Many of these new use containers are not covered by the current bottle bill .Now to deal with these developments several versions of new and expanded bottle bills are dancing their way through the legislature. However the future of any expanded bottle bill is in doubt.
But Gov. Peter Shumlin said he opposed expanding the bottle law, which he called one of Vermont’s “old dinosaurs.”
“I would like to see us as a state move to a policy where everything gets recycled and where we have one-stop recycling where we don’t have to take some items to a grocery store and other items to your green bins,”
Supporting the legislative bottle bill changes is a report by VPIRG that says unredeemed deposits could generate $1.27 million a year and gain 100 new jobs for the state.
According to VPIRG, this program has an 85 percent recycling rate and its expansion is supported by 86 percent of the state.
Seems as if even an “old dinosaur” bottle bill with an 86 percent support number could almost run for office and win.
when the local Girl Scouts/Boy Scouts/spelling team/sports team/church youth group come by on a bottle drive.
Since my childhood, bottles have remained the unencumbered currency of kids’ commerce.
Bottle bills were highly controversial when they came on the scene, but they’ve been extremely successful since. They’ve increased recycling compliance, they’ve greatly reduced roadside litter (broken bottles, ugh), they’ve given the state another (albeit small) revenue stream, and as Sue points out, they’ve given lots of schoolkids a fundraising tool. With the explosive growth in sales of non-carbonated beverages, an extension of the deposit law would seem to make all kinds of sense.
I also see Shumlin’s point about modern recycling methods being much better and easier to use — and maybe that does make bottle deposits “old dinosaurs.”
It’s also possible that this is one of his periodic “kick the hippies” moves. I don’t know. One item of information that would help me decide: how widespread are the modern recycling programs? At our house, we simply toss all the recyclables into a single container; if everyone (or almost everyone) in the state can do the same, then maybe the deposit law is an old dinosaur.
This statement begs the question whether the program has an 85 percent recycling rate, and it raises the issue of whether the 85% number is merely a compliance rather than a “recycling” rate. I’m not sure that people complying with the law would not recycle (in fact that idea is preposterous) and the implication that 15 percent of the bottles are NOT being recycled – merely because they are not redeemed – is false. The ultimate message that expanding the bottle bill will mean more recycling is highly suspect as well.
We cannot have too much recycling and we cannot have enough clean-up and/or proper disposal of trash. However, the question is not compliance with a law, the issue is whether the law is effective.
The bottle bill came into effect at a different time in our history. People’s habits and attitudes have changed.
This issue now is whether the bottle bill is the most effective way to encourage recycling, whether it is an important component to advance the overall recycling policy of the state, and whether abandoning the bottle bill altogether will mean less recycling.
The discussion I’d like to see is whether all the resources that go into administering the bottle bill have a net “green” effect.
One effect of the bill is that 10s or probably 100s of thousands of dollars go to Vermont’s few alcoholic beverage distributorship monopolies. Thousands of people people pay the extra 5, 10, 15 cents etc. and then put the bottle in their recycling bins on trash day. Many others, such as myself, do not return bottles to a redemption center (thus subsidizing distributorships with “free” money) because it is too expensive to redeem bottles.
Example: I drop my bottles in the recycling bins at the dump – just like thousands of other people – because receiving a $20 bill every two months costs me more than the time, driving, gas and other inconveniences of using the nearest redemption center. By not redeeming my bottles and recycling them directly at the dump, I save money.
This entire issue needs a holistic accounting of the time, money, waste, efficacy, carbon expenditures, incentive vs. behavior, bottle distributor state mandated welfare, and other wasteful procedures that go into this program. In light of all this, does this program still work today IF the question is “does this program do more harm than good?” OR “Does this program tie up resources and prevent us from doing more good than the minimal level of incentive the bottle bill provides?”
I also wonder if we add up all the lost money and other resources that go into this dinosaur program whether we might decide to put those resources to work finding greener and cheaper ways to accomplish the exact same goal. I am not convinced that the bottle bill in 2012 leads to a cleaner environment OR that the marginal good effects of this bill outweigh much more effective ways to protect our environment.