Would you be more inclined to recycle your water bottle if you got cash back when you did?
Proponents of “bottle bills” think so, and they want Illinois to join the 11 other states in the country that have container deposit laws. Under the controversial laws, which vary by state, consumers are charged a little extra money — typically 5 cents or 10 cents — when they buy a beverage at the store, and they get that deposit back when they return their empty bottle for recycling.
The little green incentive has a big green impact, advocates say, with bottle bill states typically enjoying recycling rates of 70 percent to 80 percent for beverage containers — much higher than the national beverage container recycling rate of 33 percent, according to the Container Recycling Institute, a Washington-based proponent of bottle bills.
Yet adopting a bottle bill is no slam dunk. Critics have successfully lobbied against such bills, arguing that they create an unnecessary and costly logistical headache in places that already have what they consider to be more efficient recycling systems, like Chicago’s curbside programs.
The explosion of bottled water in the U.S. and the widespread failure to recycle plastic water bottles have renewed interest in bottle bills. Most existing bills were created in the 1970s and ’80s to stem litter from soda cans and only require deposits for soda containers. In recent years, as bottled water has gained on soft drinks in popularity, California, Oregon and Maine have rewritten their laws to add bottled water, and Hawaii included bottled water when it signed a new bottle bill in 2002. Iowa, Michigan, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Delaware still don’t cover bottled water in their deposit laws.
Illinois has tried several times over the past decade to adopt a bottle bill, but those efforts have been brought down by opposition from retailers, distributors and some recyclers who don’t think such a bill is the best recycling option.
Most recently, in 2005, Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn drafted state legislation requiring a 5 cent deposit on beverage containers, but the proposal died in committee before it reached the House floor, according to Quinn spokeswoman Elizabeth Austin.
Quinn has no plans to reintroduce a bottle bill, Austin said.
“It continues to be a concern for the lieutenant governor, but unfortunately at this time, the Illinois General Assembly has not made a bottle bill recycling program a high priority,” Austin said.
Mike Mitchell, president of the Illinois Recycling Association, said any attempt to adopt a bottle bill “would really be an uphill fight.”
“Even people with the best interests of recycling in mind disagree about whether the bottle bill is the way to go,” said Mitchell, who won’t take sides on whether Illinois should adopt a bottle bill because the association’s members are split about it.
A chief criticism of bottle bills is that they cover only about 20 percent of a household’s recyclable materials and ignore other recyclables such as milk jugs and paper, said Greg Maxwell, senior vice president of Resource Management Companies, a Chicago Ridge-based recycler that handles Chicago’s blue cart program.
Curbside collection programs, which include Chicago’s blue cart and blue bag systems, are more efficient because they accept all sorts of recyclable materials, Maxwell said, and operating both curbside and a bottle bill would be expensive.
“The bottle bill makes no sense anymore,” Maxwell said.
There also are sanitation concerns for retailers who would have to store dirty used bottles alongside other food items, said Rob Karr, vice president of government relations for the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, which opposes bottle bills. Plus, adding a deposit to bottles would increase the price of beverages, as retailers and distributors would pass the cost of handling the returned bottles on to consumers, Karr said.
But Julie Dick, a board member with the pro-bottle bill Chicago Recycling Coalition, said bottle bills save money in the long run. Unredeemed deposits pay for other environmental and recycling initiatives and help retailers defray the cost of the deposit program, she said. Also, by helping keep bottle litter off the streets, Dick said, bottle bills reduce city clean-up costs.
The bills also compel more people to recycle, Dick said. Growing up in Michigan, Dick remembers collecting and returning bottles in high school “to make some extra cash.”
“I saw people recycling who wouldn’t have made the effort otherwise because a lot of people don’t want to be throwing out 10 cents each time,” she said.
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Recycler: Focus on curbside pickup
Supporters of bottle bills say they give recycling incentives to people who don’t have curbside recycling.
Chicago’s blue bag and blue cart recycling programs only serve single-family homes and residences with four units or fewer; larger residential buildings, offices and businesses have to set up their own recycling, and many don’t.
Greg Maxwell, senior vice president of Resource Management Companies, a Chicago Ridge-based recycler, agrees that’s a problem, but he thinks better curbside recycling — not a bottle bill — is the solution.
“There’s so much untapped recyclable material [in multiunit residences], it’s like a crime,” he said. “What they really should be focusing on is the [curbside] infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist,” he said.
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aelejalderuiz@tribune.com
