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

Australian Town Bans Bottled Water

By Meraiah Foley, New York Times

BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA — When the residents of Bundanoon voted last week to stop selling bottled water in town, they never expected to be thrust into the global spotlight.

With a nearly unanimous show of hands at a community meeting on July 8, locals in this tourist town touched off a worldwide debate about the social and environmental effects of bottled water that has put the beverage industry on the defensive.

State and local officials across the United States have been phasing out the use of bottled water at government workplaces in recent years, citing a range of concerns including the energy used to make and transport the bottles and an erosion of public trust in municipal water supplies. But as far as campaigners are aware, Bundanoon is the first town in the world to stop all sales of bottled water.

Set in the cool highlands southwest of Sydney, Bundanoon is a sleepy village of tidy gardens and quaint cottages surrounded by the weekend estates of wealthy urbanites. It is the sort of place where strangers strike up conversations on park benches along the picturesque main street and townsfolk leave fresh flowers on the local war memorial.

According to Huw Kingston, the owner of Ye Olde Bicycle Shoppe and a leader of the “Bundy on Tap” campaign, the ban did not begin as an environmental crusade. It started when a Sydney-based bottling company sought permission to extract millions of liters from the local aquifer.

At first, residents were upset at the prospect of tanker trucks rumbling through their quiet streets. But as opposition grew, Mr. Kingston said many began to question the “bizarre” notion of trucking water some 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, north to a plant in Sydney, only to transport it somewhere else — possibly even back to Bundanoon — for sale.

“We became aware, as a community, of what the bottled water industry was all about,” said Mr. Kingston. “So the idea was floated that if we don’t want an extraction plant in our town, maybe we shouldn’t be selling the end product at all.”

A dozen or so activists got together and called a community meeting. Of the 356 locals who turned out to vote by a show of hands, only one objected.

The ban is entirely voluntary. But with the support of the public, the town’s six food retailers have agreed to pull bottled water from their shelves starting in September. They plan to recoup their losses by selling inexpensive, reusable bottles that can be filled at drinking fountains and filtered water dispensers to be placed around town.

Some of the town’s 2,500 residents say they support the plan because they worry about the effects of chemicals in plastic bottles; some view it as a positive demonstration against the water plant. Others, however, are skeptical that the cash-strapped local council will be able to maintain the new drinking fountains. And others worry about the health implications of leaving only sweetened alternatives on refrigerator shelves.

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Source: New York Times

Lawsuit Filed to Block Law Encouraging Recycling of Water Bottles

By Nicholas Confessore, The New York Times

ALBANY – A coalition of bottled water companies filed suit on Tuesday to block an expanded bottle deposit law scheduled to take effect next month, arguing that the law, which imposes a deposit fee on bottled water sold in New York State, is unconstitutional.

The coalition includes Nestlé Waters North America; the International Bottled Water Association, an industry trade group; and Keeper Springs, a small bottler owned by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental advocate.

The new law requires distributors to collect a 5-cent deposit per bottle of water, which can in turn be redeemed by consumers, provisions designed to encourage New Yorkers to recycle the billions of water bottles now thrown away each year. But companies that bottle water must affix a new universal product code label to bottles sold in New York.

In a complaint filed in United States District Court in Manhattan, the water companies argued that the labeling requirement violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause because the language of the bill excludes any drink to which sugar has been added, like sports drinks. The complaint also charges that the requirement violates the Constitution’s interstate commerce protections because the wording of the law also seems to ban companies from selling the New York-labeled bottles in other states.

The lawsuit comes as Gov. David A. Paterson, who pushed to include the expanded recycling law as part of the budget passed in April, is considering proposals that would scrap or delay some of aspects of the program, like moving back the June 1 deadline for companies to begin using the UPC label.

In a court filing supporting the lawsuit, Mr. Kennedy, who is also chief prosecuting attorney of Riverkeeper, an environmental group, said the new law would undermine municipal recycling programs by depriving them of revenue from recycled plastic water bottles. Riverkeeper has staunchly supported expanding the deposit law to include bottled water. Mr. Kennedy said that he was speaking for himself and not for Riverkeeper.

In an interview, Mr. Kennedy said that that “the sugar lobby, and its indentured servants in the Legislature,” wrote the law to penalize bottlers of plain water.

“There is no rational basis for penalizing water,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It means that if I add a little sugar to my water, I don’t have to pay my redemption fee.”

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Source:  The New York Times