There’s something about the post-election hangover that causes people to say really goofy things, and sometimes to publish them in an op-ed.
Case in point, Globe columnist Tom Keane. Personally, I’m not a big fan anyway, but this one’s downright silly.
It’s time to get rid of bottle deposits…. The notion of deposits on containers is deeply problematic, a flawed scheme from the 1980s. I first became disillusioned with the law when, living in Boston, I’d find my trash bags razored by bottle-pickers, debris strewn about. Now I’m in an apartment building, and single-stream recycling is — literally — down the hall: one chute for trash, one for recyclables. Trudging to the store to return bottles and cans makes no sense. From my point of view — and that of many others, I suspect — the expanded bottle bill would have been simply more money out of my pocket.
This is a classic self-absorbed bottle-bill-hater argument. It’s messy; it’s a hassle for me; my life would be simpler and cheaper if I didn’t have to pay deposits on bottles. It’s an argument that’s been made since the first bottle bill was passed; it’s been rejected for years. Nothing has changed.
But somehow, in light of Question 2’s failure at the ballot, the time has come to get rid of all bottle deposits? Say what? Surely, Keane has some excellent arguments in store. Before we examine them, let’s recall why we have a bottle bill in the first place. It is in place to solve a very specific problem, namely, discarded bottles on the streets. Litter. If there’s a financial incentive not to throw a bottle onto the street, people won’t do it, the argument goes – and if they do, someone else will pick it up. And it works: as we all know, 80% of deposit containers are recycled, compared to only about 25% of non-deposit containers.
OK. So, what does Keane have in the way of arguments for getting rid of the bottle bill, aside from the standard argument noted above?
The existing law is antiquated and in need of updating. But since that’s not going to happen, it’s time to come up with some new approaches.
Expanding “pay-as-you-throw” programs would be one approach. Now in place in more than 140 Massachusetts communities, the concept is to charge homeowners a fee for each bag of trash they put out, while collecting recyclables for free. According to case studies by the state, such programs can dramatically increase recycling.
#Fail. Pay-as-you-throw may be a fine idea, but it has nothing to do with the litter problem. Pay-as-you-throw creates an incentive to put recyclable waste in the recycling bin, instead of in a trash bag. But litter, by definition, doesn’t end up in either. If someone’s already inclined to toss their empty water bottle onto the street, pay-as-you-throw doesn’t create any incentive not to do so.
At the same time, we could follow the example of Delaware, which abandoned its bottle deposit law in 2010 and moved to what the state calls “universal recycling.” Initially funded with a fee on beverages, all businesses have to participate, and all household trash haulers have to offer residents single-stream recycling. Since the bottle bill ended, the percent of Delaware’s trash that is recycled has climbed from 33.7 to 40.1, according to the state.
Still not good enough, for several reasons. First, a 40% recycling rate may be good for Delaware; it obviously pales in comparison to the 80% recycling rate of deposit containers in Massachusetts. Second, common sense tells you that many single-serving beverage containers are not consumed at home or in a restaurant. Rather, they are something you pick up at a convenience store, you drink, and then you throw away (either in a trash can or on the street). It’s commendable, but I’d venture quite rare, for people to chug that bottle of water and then hang onto the empty bottle until you get home several hours later so that you can dutifully toss it into your single-stream recycling bin. Most people just don’t operate that way. Plus, notice that Delaware’s plan was “initially funded with a fee on beverages,” which sounds a lot like a tax (much moreso than the bottle bill, where deposits are refundable). I imagine that’s going to go well.
And that’s all he’s got. Astonishingly, Keane never comes to grips with the basic point about the bottle bill: it works. It’s too bad it didn’t get expanded; what that means is that we’ll continue to see water and juice bottles on the streets, both in communities that have single-stream curbside recycling and communities that don’t, just as we do now. Getting rid of deposits all together would simply mean that we’d start seeing Coke cans and beer bottles on the streets as well, which now is fairly rare. And that would be good because…?
Christopher says
Maybe it is a little selfish, but people are busy and this seems like one more thing. Recycling needs to be as effortless as possible to maximize participation. If litter is the issue create publicly accessible ways to get rid of it when you’re out and about.
David says
These new programs would of course fall from the sky, without cost or inconvenience to anyone, right? And there will be unicorns?
Anyone who wants to get rid of the bottle bill needs to come to grips with the fact that (a) it works, and (b) a substitute that’s as effective is going to cost money, which will mean new taxes. Good luck with that.
Christopher says
The state or communities should provide them in strategic locations. Plenty of public parks have trash cans so this idea does not sound that far-fetched.
David says
We have lots of public trash cans, yet bottles still get thrown on the street. Adding public recycling bins will not solve the litter problem, even a little bit.
edgarthearmenian says
empty pizza boxes, empty KFC containers, etc. in my neck of the woods, than there are bottles or cans. This problem is much more severe than the bottles and cans. Let’s not be hung up on just bottles and cans; you will not solve the litter problem if you keep it so one dimensional.
Al says
Aside from the spur of the moment drink purchases at convenience locations, they return to the site of their beverage purchases on a regular schedule. Just bring the empties back the next time you shop. Make it a habit. It only amounts to a few bottles a week.
Christopher says
That requires more planning than I usually give my trips to the grocery store. I’ll be coming home from work and think I should stop for groceries, but whoops – I didn’t think of this as I was getting ready for work and don’t have my bag of empties with me. I know myself – I’d have good intentions, but the above would keep happening and the empties would just pile up.
Bob Neer says
Recycling has nothing to do with the bottle bill. Please try to follow David’s argument.
drikeo says
If you polled Massachusetts residents, asking whether they have a litter problem where they live or they see a litter problem in most of the places they go, I’m guessing the vast majority would say no.
Seriously, if the gameplan was to sell Q2 as the cure to the litter monster enveloping Massachusetts, you needed a bigger monster.
Al says
I walk my North Shore suburban neighborhood daily, so I see the litter, up close. That’s clear and something we can understand. What we don’t know is how many of these containers are making it into the recycling stream compared to bottles and cans under the deposit regime? Is the answer that the deposits have driven the recycling compliance on soda and beer containers, or is it that many communities have curbside recycling that are being used? What can we do to increase proper disposal and recycling of all the other containers targeted under this defeated question? What are the actual rates of recycling for the different groups of containers, traditional bottles and cans vs the new water, juice and fruit drink bottles.
drikeo says
For starters:
That’s apples to oranges. He’s talking about the total recycling rate for Delaware, which includes deposit containers that had previously covered by the bottle bill. So more stuff got recycled post-bottle bill in Delaware. We can argue whether curbside single-stream + bottle bill would have gotten them even more (and we’d need data on whether there’s been an increase/decrease on former deposit containers in DE), but I care about the entire solid waste stream not just one pet subsection of it.
Good luck winning people over with that “yep, it’s inconvenient and fuck you” attitude. I say the government should be respectful of people’s time and providing convenience when and where it can, and doing so would be a prime example of progressive government.
Yet the larger point is that, after Tuesday’s drubbing, either a ballot initiative or the Governor/Legislature are coming after the existing bottle bill (or the latter followed by the former if the latter goes nowhere). Eventually that side is going to prevail. So my suggestion is, rather than rail against the inevitable, figure out how to build a better mousetrap.
David says
Let’s do that first, and see what happens. If there were no longer a need for the bottle bill, I’d be happy to get rid of it. Problem is, we still need it.
drikeo says
I would respectfully suggest expanded bottle bill proponents first should have taken that advice before engaging in this crash-and-burn ballot question.
kirth says
Please see my comment about the random spot in a town that has curbside recycling, where I counted 18 water bottles in a stretch of roadside less than 80 feet long. Oh, wait — you did see it. Yet you did not get the point: curbside recycling does absolutely jack shit to address litter. Deposits are responsible for the near-absence of tonic bottle litter. Eliminate the deposit law, and I guarantee you’ll see pop-and-beer-bottle litter increase exponentially. I can be confident saying that, because I remember what it was like before the Bottle Bill, and how quickly it had a huge effect.
You want to go back to the days of plastic-and-glass covered roadsides? I don’t.
Christopher says
…that a good stopgap for poverty is let people scrape up all the bottles they can find so maybe they can afford lunch at McDonald’s that day.
David says
eliminate it? I doubt these folks would approve.
Bob Neer says
People should be allowed to make money as they are best able, within the law. There are many difficult and unappealing jobs: should those be forbidden as well, just because they are judged a “stopgap for poverty.”
Christopher says
I’m saying it shouldn’t be touted as a feature nor be the reason to do it.
drikeo says
Massachusetts does not have universal, curbside, single-stream recycling. It should. Recycling advocates should have made that the priority. Then, they could have come back with an expanded bottle bill proposal to close any existing gaps.
Instead, they pushed the wrong initiative and got trounced. Not just trounced, beaten so badly that the existing bottle bill is surely in the crosshairs. Rest assured, it’s coming.
As for your patch of untended road in Burlington, you’ll excuse me if I don’t inflate that into a statewide crisis. I dislike litter intensely, but your argument that the only cure is an add-on fee is silly. I don’t see Dunks bags and wrappers piled ankle-deep. I don’t see used tissues flung around carelessly. Hell, I remember when I was kid and parents used to have to warn you not to play in an abandoned fridge because there were actually a fair number of abandoned fridges that you’d encounter. I even used to collect bottle caps because they were all over the place. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as litter anymore, but there’s metric tons less of it and most of that isn’t covered by a deposit law.
David says
You’re not looking. I see plenty of them. Why I routinely remove them from my front yard because some asshole drives by and tosses them out his window.
I don’t know about “used tissues,” but they would certainly degrade a lot faster than a plastic water bottle.
drikeo says
I bike all over metro Boston and I’m neither dodging a lot of litter on the roadside nor am I seeing a lot of it on the roadside. If you truly are getting trash thrown in your front yard on a frequent basis, you have drawn a very short straw.
Point remains that there’s a laundry list of food and personal items people consume/use on the go that create trash not covered by a deposit law, yet we aren’t swimming in a sea of them. As someone who detests litter, I just don’t think the hyperbole helps.
Al says
and the like exist on major thoroughfares where Dunks and similar stores are located. At least that’s been the case in my community. OTOH, the water/juice/sport drink bottles are appearing everywhere.
kirth says
Name one town abutting Burlington that does NOT have curbside recycling. For all practical purposes, recycling may as well be universal, so far as those pieces of roadside go. None of those pieces of litter were diverted to the recycling stream because of curbside pickup. How are you not seeing this? Curbside recycling has absolutely no effect on littering.
The deposit is not an add-on fee, at least not for anyone who returns their bottles. For litterbugs, it is, but they are the ones who ought to pay to pick up their mess, don’t you think? Or don’t you?
Get off your bike and walk some. As you whiz by, you’re inevitably not seeing hundreds of water bottles lovingly placed in the weeds by passing decorators, because you’re watching the road, and because they’re smaller than refrigerators.
david’s experience of having to pick litter off his property is by no means unusual. I have to believe you rent or live in a condo, where somebody else is paid to deal with the stuff. You’re just not seeing, or refusing to admit seeing that there’s a problem, and that curbside recycling has no effect on that problem.
You could implement statewide curbside recycling with pickups every hour, and it would not make any difference in the amount of litter people create. None.
Al says
to get the spur of the moment drink purchase containers into the recycling stream. These are a lot of what you see along the streets as litter. Also, in my case, I don’t like automatic fee escalators built into legislation. If they want to raise fees, or taxes for that matter, I’d like to see a conscious debate and a decision with a vote attached to it by legislators. I know with the against all tax increases ever crowd that can be nearly impossible, but there you are. It’s legislators jobs to make decisions like that. They fight like hell to get the jobs, now they should do it.
Peter Porcupine says
…do YOU want to do the pickup in Wellfleet and North Adams? A nickle a bottle, a buck for the gas.
That said – I would have supported a straight expansion onto water and tea as the current system is structured. I would have supported creating an enviornmental fund for unredeemed deposits.
But like many others, I could NOT support the indexing of the deposit that was buried in the bill. I think that Q. 1 dragged down Q. 2 as many people voted against automatic increases as a matter of principle.
David says
that the indexing was an unnecessary and foolishly controversial idea that should never have been included. A nickel has worked well for decades; it was dumb to get overly fancy by indexing it so that it’s 7.32 cents in a couple of years.
Bob Neer says
I also think an important point lost in current discussion is that expanding the bottle bill would save millions of dollars in reduced litter cleanup costs. The question should have had a more transparent allocation of deposit fees to direct cleanup measures, thereby further reducing the cost burden on municipalities. At base, this is a conservative proposition: pay as you go.
Christopher says
I have to admit I always saw this as a measure to increase recycling and the litter thing just baffled me not because I never see it (though I don’t think I see as much as some on this thread have claimed to), but because it would never cross my mind. Plus there are fines levied directly for littering (yes, I know only if you are caught, kind of like voter fraud, but let’s not dare prevent that by showing ID, but I digress). What if we applied deposits only to the single-serving containers likely to be tossed aside, but not to two-liter bottles or other containers likely to be brought home where they can be recycled?
fredrichlariccia says
he is a shill and apologist for business special interests and let the public interest be damned.
I proudly supported and voted for Q2 and would again
to make the polluters pay.
Save our environment from the malefactors of great wealth.
The Elizabeth Warren economic populist revolution is coming. Beware all you 1%ers. Your days are numbered.
Overturn Citizens United and restore our Democracy now.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
edgarthearmenian says
Are you for real???
SomervilleTom says
Yes, he and we (Elizabeth Warren populists) are for real.
masslib says
Talk about if it isn’t broke don’t fix it. I actually leave my bottle recyclables in a bag for a guy who rummages through peoples bins on recycling day for the bottles.
Now personally, I voted to include other bottles in the recycling policy, but I think a lot of voters voted against it just because it was another tax at a time when they are still feeling the squeeze.
Al says
was the automatic escalator built into the deposits and fees. It’s the same thing that led me to support the gas tax question. If the Lege wants to see an increase in a tax or fee, then let them debate it and take a vote on it. I know there’s a strong anti tax crowd who will never support any tax increase, and that it makes it difficult to get these new revenues, but that’s the job legislators ran for, so they should do it. If they don’t want to do it, resign and let someone else step up.
Christopher says
After all, that’s exactly the argument we use to support indexing the minimum wage.
jconway says
You voted against two policies you support since you were mad legislators weren’t able to vote on it first? Clearly the voters just demonstrated they are so anti-tax, that no increases could ever happen. The failure to increase the gas tax in the past, the failure to increase the income tax and decrease the sales tax, and the failure to be fiscally responsible on a consistent basis over on tax averse Beacon Hill led to the need for indexing. And of course, the voters, feeling the pinch and taking it personally, voted against it. So now we won’t have any new revenue on the table for the next four years.
It may only be the next two if we actually bother to fix the House and make it more democratic and progressive.