Commentary—

Extend Bottle Deposit Law,

Or More Curbside Recycling?

By Chris Powell

Should Connecticut’s bottle deposit law be extended beyond carbonated drinks to cover individual-serving containers of juice, tea, sports beverages, water, and such?

As happened with the original “bottle bill,” enacted by the General Assembly and the governor in 1978, this year’s debate is pitting environmentalists against the beverage and retail industries, and libertarians against collectivists. Ideologies and interests aside, everyone has some good points, unfortunately. This is a hard issue.

Even some of those who opposed the bottle deposit law 23 years ago may acknowledge that it dramatically reduced roadside litter, even if this did not come about quite as expected. That is, it probably came about not because the slobs who were tossing beer cans out car windows stopped doing so when each incident of slobbery started costing them a nickel, but because, simultaneous with enactment of the bottle bill, Connecticut emptied its mental hospitals and stopped arresting alcoholics, and so, by necessity, the mentally ill and the alcoholic entered the recycling business to obtain a meager sustenance.

The problem now is that non-carbonated drinks have gotten more popular, and their empty aluminum, plastic, glass, and cardboard containers are lying around everywhere. Only the occasional good citizens out for a walk or scout troops doing good works bother to pick them up and put them in the trash or a recycling bin. The increase in plastic and cardboard containers, the former usually without labels, the latter with labels that easily wear off, would make attribution of container deposits to wholesalers virtually impossible, and thus an extension of the deposit law in its present form might be a huge imposition on industry.

Further, the beverage and retail industries note that the bottle deposit law now may be hindering recycling by removing from ordinary household and curbside recycling programs the aluminum cans that could make them profitable. So instead of extending the bottle deposit law, the industry people say, those curbside recycling programs should be extended. The implication is that the bottle deposits should be repealed so that more cans are recycled at curbside rather than returned for deposits.

Tellingly, as the legislature’s debate over extending the bottle law began, opponents of the idea noted that the Legislative Office Building itself is without a recycling program and has been discarding recyclable containers.

But even if every street in Connecticut had weekly curbside recycling, would the slobs stop hurling containers out of car windows? Not likely, and the wandering mentally ill and alcoholics, on whom the current recycling system is partly built, still would have no incentive to clean up litter for which there was no bounty.

The environmentalists object that beverage wholesalers have been allowed to keep unclaimed bottle deposits in the amount of about $15 million per year. The wholesalers reply that this money only covers the cost of their accepting containers that aren’t really their own. It’s hard to tell who is right.

Maybe any revenue from extension of the bottle deposit law will just have to be shared with the industry that does the work of the additional recycling. But if such an arrangement duplicated the accomplishment of the original bottle law, it might be a fair price to pay for a cleaner Connecticut.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)