In all of recycling, nothing is more con-sistently controversial than bottle bills.

Are these laws, which place a small depositon beverage containers, cost-effective? Arethey efficient? Do they duplicate curbsiderecycling collection programs or rob themof valuable materials? Do they control lit-ter? Has their time come and gone?

Over the last 20 years, legislatures inalmost every state have entertained propos-als for new beverage container deposit laws,yet none – save California and Hawaii – havepassed, and very few have even reached thefloor for a vote. During that same time, nostate bottle bill has ever been repealed,although the nation’s one local bottle bill, inColumbia, Missouri, was overturned in avoter referendum heavily financed byretailers and bottlers.

A line in the sand The battle lines have beendrawn for decades. Fromlocal to national levels, bot-tle-bill supporters includeenvironmental and publicinterest organizations,redemption center owners andprocessors, state governmentrecycling officials, citizen activists and,

and food and beverage retailers. Conspicuously silent on the issue are the

container manufacturers: Alcan (Montreal)and Alcoa (Pittsburgh), Owens-Illinois (Tole-do, Ohio), Anchor Glass (Tampa Bay, Flori-da), Saint-Gobain Containers (Muncie, Indi-

ana), and many of the processors andend-users in the plastics industry.

These companies all benefit fromthe supply of clean, sorted mate-

rial generated by deposit states,which for the most part ischeaper than feedstocks

made from virgin materi-als, but their relationships

as evidenced by public opinion polls, thepublic at large. Opposed are trade organi-zations for the glass, plastic and aluminumpackaging industries; soft drink, beer andbottled water brand owners and distributors;

Resource Recycling September 2004 1

Are bottle bills still relevant?

Jenny Gitlitz is Research Director for the Container Recy-

cling Institute (Arlington,Virginia).She can be contacted at (413) 684-4746.

The two faces of beveragecontainer recycling

in America.

by Jenny Gitlitz

Reprinted from

RESOURCERECYCLINGNorth America’s Recycling and Composting Journal

with their clients – the beverage companiesand their distributors – prevent them frompublicly supporting bottle bills.

Don’t look now, but we’re in troubleSo why all the fuss about bottle bills? Manyargue that bottle bills are irrelevant becauseso many communities have curbside collec-tion programs. Additionally, the nationalattention paid to bottles and cans has wanedas the recycling community has turned itsattention to other concerns, such as elec-tronics recycling. But what many in the recy-cling arena do not realize is that beveragecontainer recycling in the U.S., despite a hugeboost in the early 1990s, is in serious trou-ble.

Aluminum can recycling has plummetedfrom a high of 65 percent in 1995 to 44 per-cent in 2003, a 25-year low. The PET bottlerecycling rate dropped below 20 percent in2002, down from 33 percent in 1995. TheGlass Packaging Institute (Alexandria, Vir-ginia) hasn’t even published a recycling ratesince hitting 31 percent in 1998, and the U.S.EPA’s 2000 estimate for beverage glass recy-cling was about 25 percent. Anecdotal evi-dence suggests that increasing quantities ofglass are being trashed – though the term"daily landfill cover" sounds much more dain-ty. Add it all up, and the combined nationalrecycling rate for these three major beveragepackages went from 54 percent in 1992 to37 percent a decade later.

The absolute quantity of bottles and canslandfilled, littered or incinerated has nearlydoubled during the last decade, going from64 billion units in 1992 to 118 billion in 2002.During that same period, aluminum-can wast-ing increased from 551,000 to 820,000 tonsper year, while PET bottle wasting increasedfrom 395,000 tons to 1.4 million tons. Fig-ure 1 illustrates the increase in container wast-ing from 1982 to 2002.

The increased tonnages appear paradox-ical since the number of curbside programsin the U.S. tripled during the 1990s, as shownin Figure 2; however, the figures can beattributed to a number of factors:� Increased away-from-home consumption;� The decimation of the buyback infra-

structure;� Stagnant scrap prices;� Decreased emphasis on recycling by gov-

ernment and the media;� Growing public apathy.

But that is only part of the story. Thenational picture stands in stark contrast tobeverage container recycling in the tendeposit states (California, Connecticut,Delaware, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts,Michigan, New York, Oregon and Vermont).Recycling rates in the deposit states rangefrom 60 percent in California – where the

2001, a multi-stakeholder report by Busi-nesses and Environmentalists Allied for Recy-cling (BEAR) found that a combination ofrecycling methods in the nation’s ten depositstates recycled a total of 490 beer and sodacontainers per capita in 1999, at an averageunit cost of $0.0153. Meanwhile, the nation's40 non-deposit states, which relied solely oncurbside and drop-off programs, recycled atotal of 191 containers per capita, at an aver-age cost of $0.0125 per container. In otherwords, deposit states have great bang for thebuck. At an additional cost of only $0.0168per six-pack, deposit states’ recovery rates

California Redemption Value (CRV) was,until recently, as low as 2.5 cents per unit –to 70 percent and higher in states where thedeposit is a nickel and 95 percent in Michi-gan, the only state with a dime deposit. Fig-ure 3 illustrates this disparity between thedeposit states and the national average, whileFigure 4 highlights the difference in 1999between deposit states and non-depositstates.

Outperforming the JonesesNow let’s look at efficiency as measured interms of cost and per-capita recovery. In

Resource Recycling September 20042

Source: Container Recycling Institute, 2003.

Figure 1 U.S. Beverage Containers Wasted, 1982-2002

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

2002

1992

1982

PET plastic bottlesGlass BottlesAluminum Cans

23

32

52

2522

27

36

36

Billi

ons

of u

nits

Source: Container Recycling Institute, 2004.

Figure 2 U.S. Access to Curbside Recycling vs. Container Recycling Rates, 1990-2003

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Glass bottles

Glass bottles

PET plastic bottles

PET plastic bottles

Aluminum cans

Aluminum cansCurbside access

Curbside access

20032002200120001999199819971996199519941993199219911990

Beve

rage

con

tain

er re

cycl

ing

rate

s an

d ac

cess

to c

urbs

ide

recy

clin

g, in

per

cent

Resource Recycling September 2004 3

are more than two-and-a-half-times higherthan states without bottle bills.

Bottle bill opponents have seized ondeclining redemption rates in deposit statesas evidence that these laws no longer work.Although redemption rates have slipped froma high of 85 percent in New York and Mass-achusetts to about 70 percent today, that's stilltwice as high as the national average, whichis itself pulled up by the high rates in thedeposit states.

The declining redemption rate is largely

beverages would be added to the laws – asthey have in California and Maine; and oner-ous brand-sorting would be eliminated. Inan ideal world, laws would be uniform fromone state to another, making the entireprocess more consumer-friendly, moreresistant to fraud and more cost-effectivefor bottlers and distributors.

But it is not an ideal world. For every pro-posal to update or expand a bottle bill, anoth-er would repeal it altogether or replace it withan advanced disposal fee – a system provid-ing no consumer incentive to recycle or refrain

related to the failure of the nickel deposit tokeep up with inflation (a 1980 nickel is worthabout $0.022 today), and to the diversion ofcontainers into curbside recycling collectionprograms, which, with the exception of Cal-ifornia, are not counted in the redemption rate.Room for improvementTraditional bottle bills are not perfect. Inan ideal world, handling fees would beraised to better offset retailers’ and redemp-tion centers’ handling costs; the depositwould be raised to a dime; non-carbonated

Source: Container Recycling Institute, 2003.

Figure 3 Beverage Container Redemption Rates vs. U.S.Average, 1990-2002

20

40

60

80

100

U.S.

U.S.

Oregon

Oregon

Michigan

Michigan

California

California

Massachusetts

Massachusetts

New York

New York

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1989

1988

1987

1986

1985

1984

1983

Rede

mpt

ion

rate

in p

erce

nt

Source: BEAR, 2002.

Figure 4 Aggregated Beverage Container Recycling Rates in DepositStates vs. Non-Deposit States, 1999

20

40

60

80

100

Reco

very

rate

, in

perc

ent

40 Non-deposit states10 Deposit states

71.6%

27.9%

Straight from the horse’s mouth

As evidenced by the rhetoric from both sidesof the debate, supporters and detractors ofbottle bills clearly have a fight on their hands.

"My whole attitude towards the current sys-tem is that it has become irrelevant and total-ly outdated. What we really need to do isget rid of it and replace it with a more com-prehensive curbside recycling program."

– Massachusetts State Sen. Robert O’Leary,quoted in the Cape Cod Times.

"New Jersey's system…does nothing toprevent litter from being created. It's likedealing with a leaky roof by buying morebuckets. What's needed is an incentive sys-tem such as [the Massachusetts] bottle billto complement our current program."

– Sunil Somalwar, Chair, Sierra Club of NewJersey, in an August letter-to-the-editor

to the Cape Cod Times.

"When the bottle bill was first passed, recy-cling programs were in their infancy. Today,in compliance with DEP policy, every com-munity has a recycling program, allowingconsumers to place recyclable products inblue bags or bins. ...Separating at the homehas become customary and more conven-ient for busy families."– Michael DeFeo, Vice-President of Coca-Cola

Bottling New England, testifying on March 8,2004 against SB 549, which would

expand the Connecticut bottle bill to include non-carbonated containers.

"Creating a strong financial incentive for recy-cling is good for business. Glass and oth-er materials collected through deposit sys-tems, unlike those collected through curb-side recycling programs, are of a higherquality, and thus more marketable. That'swhy I support the legislation sponsored bySen. Jeffords."

– Tex Corley, President of Strategic Materials,Inc. (Houston), the nation's

largest glass processor.

from littering. In Connecticut, for example,SB 450 seeks to replace the current bottle-billsystem with advanced disposal fees and grantsto municipalities for recycling. Massachu-setts H2953, on the other hand, would repealthe bottle bill and create a short-term, indus-try-funded account for recyclinggrants and litter cleanup.

So what do most legislativecommittee chairs do? Hold theirpublic hearings, listen to the usu-al suspects on either side of theaisle deliver their spiels and, ina frustrated pseudo-compromise,opt to do nothing. The status quois preserved. From an environ-mental and economic standpoint,this status quo is unacceptable.

The environmental conse-quences of replacing 118 billionwasted bottles and cans with newones made from virgin materi-als squandered the energy equiv-alent of 33 million barrels of crude oil —enough to meet the annual needs of two mil-lion U.S. homes —and generated four mil-lion tons of greenhouse gases. Other impactsinclude groundwater contamination, SOx andNOx emissions and habitat loss from stripmining. Many of these impacts are borne by

grams, more trash to collect or more litter topick up.

In an effort to minimize these economicand environmental burdens, Senator Jim Jef-fords (I-VT) has introduced the National Bev-erage Producer Responsibility Act. If passed

by Congress, the bill wouldrequire a $0.10 deposit placed onbeverage containers in any statenot currently recycling 80 percentor more of its bottles and cans.Under the bill, the beverage indus-try would have the latitude todesign the nuts and bolts of thesystem.

Because the deposit would benational in scope, all industryarguments about interstate fraudand border business flight wouldbe eliminated and minimal indus-try costs would be passed on tothe consumer. The proposal may

not be perfect, but it certainly putsthe nation one step closer to reversing thewasting trend. RR

Reprinted with permission from Resource Recycling, P.O. Box 42270, Portland, OR97242-0270; (503) 233-1305, (503) 233-1356(fax); www.resource-recycling.com.

per capita beverage container sales climbed19 percent, from 548 to 653 billion units.Meanwhile, per capita wasting grew from 279to 413 billion units – a 48 percent increase.All this means an ever-increasing burden oncities and towns, whether through additionalvolumes in curbside recycling collection pro-

Resource Recycling September 20044

What many in the recycling arena do not realize is that beverage container recycling in the U.S.,

despite a huge boost in the early 1990s, is in serious trouble.

communities in remote resource-extractiveregions — far from the gaze of the U.S. con-sumer.

In contrast, the economic consequences ofnot recycling are primarily borne by the Amer-ican taxpayer. From 1990 to 2002, annual