You may have seen the articles about corporate funding on questions 2 (and 3) which originated with an AP story based on latest campaign filings.
Here are the details based on the same public source.
Through Oct. 15th, the anti-bottle bill campaign has raised $9 million in cash (including in-kind paid invoices), more than any other group for any of the ballot questions. This is exactly 10x as much as the bottle bill proponents. It’s mostly from out of state: 92% of the total has come from the American Beverage Association, which includes the following well-known brands: Coca-Cola (including Dasani/Glaceau), Pepsi (including Aquafina), Nestlé Waters (Poland Springs), Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Monster, Polar, Red Bull.
The remaining donations come from grocery stores and distributors. Here are the stores from largest to smallest donor:
- Stop & Shop
- Demoulas Market Basket
- Big Y
- Roche Bros.
- Price Chopper
- Wegman’s
- Donelan’s
- PriceRite (using a somewhat disguised name)
- Crosby’s
The pro-bottle bill funding has come primarily from two environmental organizations: the Sierra Club and Environmental League of Massachusetts.
Let us all now bless The Massachusetts Office of Campaign & Political Finance.
We are the stewards of this beautiful land. When are we gonna make the damn money-grubbing polluters pay ?
Send the bastards a message. VOTE YES ON 2 !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
They don’t want to handle the logistics of this and I can’t particularly blame them.
The beverage industry needs to take responsibility for the packaging they produce. Note though that the cost is eased, because “the proposed law would increase the minimum handling fee that beverage distributors must pay dealers for each properly returned empty beverage container”.
Single-serve beverage containers are a disproportionate and growing amount of the waste stream (30 billion per year in the U.S. just for water bottles). Petroleum-based plastics are synthetic and difficult materials to recycle. There is so much of it that markets have developed for for some of it, but it is almost always down-cycled not closed-loop recycled. The deposit system will improve the quality of recycling since it is separated from the mixed single-stream. Curbside recycling shifts the burden of disposal from the producers to the consumer and ultimately municipalities. That’s one reason the industry is spending so much money fighting the bill. Municipalities will save money with an increased deposit system. These are some of the reasons why you should vote YES on 2.