10 Cents' Worth

January 17, 2005
The Boston Globe (Editorial)

ANYONE WHO travels much on the littered back roads of most of the 39 states without bottle bills can appreciate how much Massachusetts benefits from its 23- year-old law. Compliance is not what it used to be, because a nickel is not what it used to be. Rather than doing away with the law -- as some have proposed -- legislators should expand the bill's reach and increase the deposit to a dime.

Just two-thirds of all soda and beer containers are returned for deposits, a rate that has been declining over the years. Some of the unredeemed containers end up in curbside recycling bins, some in the trash, and a few on roadsides. Most of the littered containers are for bottled water, lemonade, iced and herbal tea, and sports drinks, which are exempt from the deposit law.

These beverages did not make up much of the market in 1982 when the bottle bill was passed. Placing a deposit on them now would clean up roadsides, beaches, and state and municipal parks. If the deposit on these drinks and soda and beer were set at a dime, as proposed in a bill sponsored by Senator Andrea Nuciforo of Pittsfield, the redemption rate would go up. Nuciforo would also add a 15-cent deposit on wine and bottles of hard liquor, and he would hike the per-container reimbursement for retailers from 1 cent to 3 cents.

Senator Robert O'Leary of Cape Cod and the Islands offers a different approach. He would eliminate the bottle bill completely and replace it with a "litter tax" on a wide range of recyclable items, from newspapers and beverage containers to plastic and automobile tires. Cities and towns could draw on proceeds from the tax to pay for local recycling programs, he says, while the state would use the other funds to pay for roadside litter cleanup operations by Boy Scouts or others.

But without redeemable deposits on the containers, litter would proliferate.

O'Leary argues that the existing bottle bill affects just 1 percent of the total waste stream, and municipalities could do a better job on curbside programs with more money from the state. They would have such funds if the state simply provided them with the unredeemed deposit money that they did get until the state's budget crisis of two years ago. Any reform of container recycling should insist on the restoration of unredeemed deposits to the communities. That amount would grow by $5.7 million under Nuciforo's bottle bill expansion.

Even without state aid, Massachusetts communities are recycling at a rate almost double the national average.

O'Leary is skeptical that the doubling of the can and bottle fee favored by Nuciforo would actually increase bottle and can returns substantially.

It is worth a try. A dime deposit combined with an expansion of the law to noncarbonated drinks could reverse much of the backsliding of the past two decades.