Kill Bill: CT's Bottle Deposit Boondoggle
Please don’t hit me with your Range Rover Sport, Trevor.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This edition of the Heat Beat was originally published on 7/17/2019.
TOPLINE
New feature about legislative chicanery, let me know what you think
Bottle bills incentivize recycling, reduce litter, fund state enviro initiatives
10 states + Guam currently have bills, others have tried
CT's effort to reform 40 y/o bill (worst in nation) killed by industry lobbying
ACTIONS: Read, organize, donate. More details below!
KILL BILL: CT’S BOTTLE DEPOSIT BOONDOGGLE
Welcome to KILL BILL, a new, potentially recurring feature on the heat beat where I tell you about the untimely death of a particular piece of climate change legislation. I assume that most of the time, the murderer will be Colonel Corporation with the Lobbying Budget in the Closed-Door Statehouse Meeting, but you know what happens when you assume.
Anyway! Our inaugural legislative fatality comes to us from Connecticut, that Lego-shaped cultural wasteland perched on New York City’s right shoulder. (My whole family was born there; this is a joke; please don’t hit me with your Range Rover Sport the next time I’m in Darien, Trevor.)
The Constitution State is one of less than a dozen US states to tack a small deposit onto the price of certain bottles, as a way to incentivize people to return them. This is known as a “bottle bill”, and advocates & critics alike have been calling for reform to CT’s, which was launched in 1980. In January 2019, a proposal to modernize the state’s bottle bill—the country’s least effective—made it to the floor in Hartford. Now, seven months later, it’s dead. Here’s what happened.
[Image via]
BOTTLE BILLS, BRIEFLY
National Outlook
There are only 10 states in the country that have “bottle bills” (plus Guam!), so for those of you from the other 39, a quick primer. Bottle bills are laws that require retailers to collect a “deposit” on certain beverage containers, which drinkers can then get back by redeeming those containers at a return center. Oregon introduced the nation’s first one in 1971, and deposits in all participating states range from 5-10¢. It’s a basic system, but remarkably effective: advocates claim bottle bills have reduced litter between 30-40% while adding millions to the states’ economies, and that bottle-bill states recycle at rates up to 2x higher than the rest.
Wait, Isn't Recycling Bullshit?
Sort of, yes. BUT: containers redeemed for deposits tend to be cleaner, which leads to higher percentages of that material to be actually recycled, vs. sent to the dump. Still doesn't make recycling the silver bullet we've been led to believe it is... but makes our broke-ass recycling system work slightly better. Plus, less litter. Both nice!
Industry Opposition
Of course, not everyone is a fan of this system, including my mother (“that was such a pain when we lived there”) and more significantly, major consumer-packaged-goods companies, who stand to lose billions if the bills are more widely adopted. The New York Times dropped a massive report last week on the assorted skulduggery the CPG industry has used to keep bottle bills at bay, even as major corporations profess their commitments to environmental reform. It’s a doozy of a story, and referenced CT’s situation in a brief aside. I did some further digging.
MONEY MATTERS
5 Cents Makes No Sense
There are lots of nuanced reasons CT’s 39 year-old bottle bill isn’t working, and one very obvious one: the size of the deposit hasn’t kept up with inflation. According to USInflationCalculator.com, 5¢ in 1981 (one year after CT’s bottle bill went into effect) is worth about 2¢ today. Or, to put it another way, a measly nickel just ain’t the in-CENT-ive it used to be, amirite?! (I am so, so sorry.)
Handling Fee Failures
In CT, you can return bottles at “reverse vending machines” (exactly what they sound like, usually outside of supermarkets) or at 20 regional redemption centers. Either way, the distributor is eventually required to reimburse those stakeholders not only for the 5¢ deposit, but also for the labor involved in accepting the redemptions ($0.015 for each beer, $0.02 for each soda/juice/etc.) Those figures haven’t risen in four decades either, and people who operate the redemption centers say they’re losing money on this arrangement. “My insurance, my rent, my utilities—everything goes up. And we have not been compensated”, complained one owner in 2017, when an earlier reform bill was being considered in the statehouse. (That one failed, hence the current predicament.)
Unclaimed Deposits
Perhaps you’re wondering what happens to all those 5¢ deposits that get collected for bottles that never get returned. Good question. Ever since 2009, they’ve been routed directly into CT state coffers. Naturally, this has pissed the distributors, who used to keep those unredeemed deposits to defray their costs. The practice generates over $30M in annual revenue for the state, and critics allege it amounts to an illegal tax.
THE NEW BOTTLE BILL HITS HARTFORD
At the start of the 2019 legislating session, CT lawmakers on the environmental committee introduced their plan for fixing the state’s bottle boondoggle.
#BillGoals
The main provisions of HB-7294 (the reform bill) were pretty simple:
Expand the program to include more beverages by 2020
Increase the deposit to 10¢ from 5¢ by 2022
Increase the handling fee to $0.035 and $0.045 (beer & soft drinks, respectively)
Allow distributors to keep 20% of those unclaimed deposits to defray their costs
The idea was to make the system more economically viable for participants, AND lift CT’s flagging redemption rate to 90% to match leaders like Oregon and Michigan, both of which clock 90%+ redemptions. (Currently, CT’s rate is just over 50%, the lowest in the country.)
Bev Biz, Recyclers Balk
Sounds good, right? I thought so too. But from the beginning, HB-7294 faced an uphill battle against two key groups. Beverage distributors worried “these increases in container deposits and handling fees will certainly push more consumers across the [state] borders” to buy drinks in Rhode Island (no deposit) and New York (5¢ deposit.)
Commercial recycling companies, on the other hand, argued that plastic and aluminum “represent an important and strong revenue stream to our industry… To encourage the removal of metal and plastic from the recycling stream will cause substantial harm to the curbside collection hauling businesses and the recycling processors in CT.” In other words: Hey! We sell that shit! Get outta here!
“Powerful Lobbyists” Issue A “Beat Down”
That latter quotation is from a letter of opposition filed with CT legislators as they considered the bill, which were provided to your pal Dave by the Container Recycling Institute, a leading national advocate for bottle bills. (So, grain of salt, etc.) Of eight letters of opposition submitted about HB-7294:
5 were from beverage distributors or producers (CT Food Association, CT Beer Wholesalers Association, Orchard Farm Market and Winery, Hartford Distributors, Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of CT)
2 were from recycling/waste management organizations (Northbridge Environmental Management, National Waste & Recycling Association)
1 was from a concerned citizen who apparently just really hates bottle bills (Cathy)
Goodnight, Sweet Bill
The opposition worked; in a Saturday session at the beginning of June, the vice chairman diverted the bill into a study, effectively gutting it. (The dude, Democratic Rep. Joe Gresko of Stratford, had supported the 2017 reform attempt.) HB-7294 “has died in the General Assembly, the victim of some of the state’s most-powerful lobbyists” wrote a local newspaper. “The beverage industry’s high-profile presence, including the well-known lobbying firms of Gaffney Bennett Public Relations and Sullivan & LeShane Public Relations, again beat down” the increased-deposit proposal.
Out of curiosity, I cross-referenced the authors of the opposition letters with the clients listed on those firms websites. Gaffney Bennett reps the Connecticut Food Association; Sullivan & LeShane reps Hartford Distributors. Both firms represent several additional clients in the beverage and recycling industries.
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
This story caught my eye for a few reasons. We hear a lot about how lobbying influences politics, but I’ve rarely gotten the chance to play connect-the-dots like this, so that was kind of fun. (By "fun" I mean “interesting and depressing,” of course.) Statehouse politics are super-important, but fairly opaque, so this felt like a good illustration of why you should pay attention.
Most importantly, though, the life and death of HB-7294 shows how tricky this shit gets. Bottle bills are imperfect, sure, but they’re better than nothing. And yet only 20% of states have them, and improving them is a grind against bureaucracy, inertia, and—as was the case in CT—well-funded forces of corporate opposition.
ACTIONS
Read this fantastic NYT investigation on the ways beverage companies have hobbled bottle-bill reforms.
Advocate for a bottle bill in your state using the Bottle Bill Toolkit.
Consider donating to the Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit pushing for more, better bottle bills.
And now, the moment you've surely been waiting for