Connecticut’s Experiment with Bottled Water Deposits

By Gregory B. Hladky, Fairfield County Weekly

Starting last week, the soft gurgling of the estimated 561 million bottles of water sold every year in Connecticut was supposed to translate into the sweet clink of millions upon millions of nickels rolling into the threadbare pockets of state government.

Oct. 1 was the trigger date for expanding Connecticut’s long-standing system of requiring 5-cent deposits on beer and soda bottles and cans to include all those plastic water bottles.

Theoretically, the bottle-and-can deposit system ensures beverage containers are recycled, thus keeping them out of landfills and incinerators and off the streets, because consumers return them all to supermarkets or redemption centers to get all their deposits back. But lots of people don’t bother to redeem their containers and just throw them away.

A day after the new deposits hit, prices for a 24-pack of Poland Spring ranged from $3.99 at the Wethersfield Price Rite, to $5.49 at the Big Y in Ellington, to $6.99 at the Rocky Hill Stop & Shop. Sorkin said those pricing decisions are made by individual stores for reasons that could include a local sale, efforts to use up water that was delivered before wholesale prices rose, and possibly an effort to temporarily ease sticker shock for consumers.

The battle over who gets to keep the unclaimed deposits has been raging for years. Beverage distributors hired high-powered lobbyists like Pat Sullivan and Jay Malcynsky to convince lawmakers to let the industry keep the estimated $24 million in annual unclaimed deposits. They insisted they needed the money to cover beer and soda container handling and recycling costs, and their arguments and influence worked for a long time.

The turning point came late in 2008, when the recession’s brutal impact on state revenues started to become painfully clear. Lawmakers desperate for money to cover gaping holes in the budget saw those unclaimed deposits as “low-hanging fruit,” a revenue source that was a lot less painful than things like tax increases. So the General Assembly agreed to rip the unclaimed deposits away from distributors and stick them in the state’s treasury.

Environmentalists had warned for years that the mountains of plastic water bottles being thrown away were choking our landfills and polluting our air through incineration, littering our streets, and increasing our dependence on foreign oil. (The plastics used in most water bottles are petroleum-based.)

Susan Collins, executive director of the California-based Container Recycling Institute, says putting deposits on bottles and cans is “by far the way that has been most effective” in getting containers out of the waste stream and into recycling.

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Source: Fairfield Weekly