The Myth and the Reality of the New Bottle Bills
The attached article about an antique collector who returned 108 year old deposit bottles to the ICB brewery…and received his deposit plus interest…$60…The author, Michael Tanenbaum did a very good job of outlining some key points about deposit laws and bottle bills, their history and the reality.
Among them…
“The deposit-refund system was created by the beverage industry as way to guarantee the return of their glass bottles, ensuring that they could be washed, refilled and resold more cost-effectively than mass-producing them.”
This is not the case today…Deposit systems simply allow for a second means of collecting the bottles. The bottles that are collected are NOT refilled. They are, in many circumstances, sent to either a landfill or used for other purposes…Why? Glass is simply not cost effective to ship and glass plants are not local as they once were when the bottles were made to be refilled…
“It wasn’t until the 1970s that some states realized bottle deposit legislation might be a viable path toward reducing litter and picking up easy revenue from unclaimed deposits.”
KEY POINTS….Bottle bills (and it doesn’t matter if they apply to plastic, aluminum and or glass) are and have been anti – litter bills…AND…the escheats, i.e. unclaimed deposits, have and are viewed as a revenue source. THEY ARE NOT RECYCLING LAWS…They are sources of money for the state…and in fact, failure is a good thing if you want the money for other uses…
While many make claims about the higher recycling rates in bottle bill states…they are cherry picking the statistics…It may be true that on beverage containers there is a higher recycling rate, but beverage containers are a very small percentage of the stream when thinking about tons…They are visible as litter…
I cannot find a good environmental reason to support bottle bills…Has anyone done a lifecycle environmental cost of the added transportation pollution from two recycling programs? Just asking…
Read The Full Article Here:
Pennsylvania man returns 108-year-old beer bottles for ‘deposit’ from brewery.