The Bottle Bill: A State-Scale Environmental Solution

Nationwide recycling rates have increased steadily in recent years, due to improved municipal services and public awareness. The benefits of recycling are clear: landfill waste diversion, resource conservation, litter reduction, the production of high-quality recycled goods, and creation of material recovery jobs. Recycling is one of those embedded, natural concepts for existing on a finite planet – putting materials back into the active stream of utility. The tricky thing about acting on this logical, instinctual principle is capitalism. As consumers, we plow through goods produced by firms that employ us. As earthlings, we are naturally resistant to excessive waste. One proposed path of marriage for these ideas is the Bottle Bill.

The Bottle Bill refers to state legislation that requires a refundable deposit on beverage containers. Currently, 11 states have adopted container deposit programs. This program allows consumers to return certain containers to businesses for a deposit ranging from 5 to 10 cents. Bottle Bills provide a variety of benefits in addition to the implicit benefits of recycling. While necessarily incurring its own set of operating costs, it mitigates municipal landfill rate costs, which will continue to increase as landfill space becomes scarce. The deposit program also takes advantage of our rational self-interest. With an effective rebate on every can of beer, wine bottle, etc. purchased, consumers are incentivized to return the containers, especially in bulk, to redeem that rebate. While operating costs, budgets, and logistics vary from state to state, scrap revenues from deposit containers provide offsets to recycling costs and often save municipalities money (240,000 to 600,000 annually in Seattle’s case). These particular benefits are largely dependent on the whimsies of the scrap market, and by default the national economy. However, in this way, it serves as a rational, market-based incentive that has the power to turn recycling from a government/tax-payer exchange to a producer/consumer exchange.

No state has ever repealed a Bottle Bill. In fact, several states, like Oregon, have expanded their original programs to include a wider range of containers. Container deposit laws have been frequently cited as an effective method of increasing recycling rates by the Government Accounting Office. Studies of in-place programs have described indirect benefits to the program. For example, a Texas study mentions that the law increases curbside collection efficiency by removing voluminous materials. The containers collected are often cleaner and of higher quality, giving them significantly higher value in the scrap market. These programs also have been proven to reduce litter by economically disincentivizing it. One study shows that the program reduced litter in Iowa by almost 40% in 1980. The same study describes the multifaceted energy savings enjoyed along the life cycle of the material.

Bottle Bills can be customized per state, offering more opportunities for public input and circumstantial provisions. We as a nation are currently in a political climate hostile to federal spending, new economic stress, and environmental agendas. As we struggle to address environmental concerns through polarized comprehensive strategies and gridlocked fiscal debate, the Bottle Bill is an underutilized tool for tweaking the status quo to improve recycling and resource/waste management, in addition to closing waste loopholes in an economically sustainable and self-sufficient way.