40-year-old Bottle Bill needs an update to reduce trash
We need to stop kicking the can down the road.
Since its passage nearly 40 years ago, the Bottle Bill has been Massachusetts’ most successful recycling program. But time is catching up to the law, and it needs updating to deliver the best results.
A lot has changed in Massachusetts since the original Bottle Bill was established in 1983. First of all, our waste problem has grown worse. According to the new Trash in America report released by MASSPIRG and other regional public interest groups, the average American throws out nearly 1,800 pounds of trash each year. That’s a massive increase from the 1,300 pounds of trash the average American threw away in 1980. And Massachusetts is not immune to this wastefulness. We produce nearly 6 million tons of waste in the Commonwealth annually. Most of this trash consists of goods we use for a matter of minutes before throwing away — such as beverage containers.
Second, the beverage market has changed dramatically. In 2015, the Bottle Bill kept over 1.2 billion beverage containers out of our trash, but there were also over 6 billion beverage containers sold in Massachusetts that same year and most of those containers didn’t, and still don’t, have a deposit under the current law. That’s because many of the drinks on grocery shelves today — water bottles, sports drinks, iced teas, and more — did not exist when the law passed in 1982. These new containers are the ones currently littering our parks, cluttering our waterways and filling up our landfills.
And third, the devaluation of the nickel since the law took effect has hurt the effectiveness of the 5-cent deposit. There is less incentive for consumers to redeem their beverage containers than there once was. While the Commonwealth’s redemption rate peaked at 71% in 2010, it fell to 43% in 2020, the lowest of any Bottle Bill state. At the other end of that spectrum, with the highest redemption rates, are states such as Michigan, Oregon and Maine that have 10 cents or mixed deposits and whose redemption rates average around 85%.
With these changes in Massachusetts over the past 40 years, it’s time we help the Bottle Bill catch up. When we and other advocates tried to update the law at the ballot box in 2014, the bottling and beverage industries spent more than $9 million dollars opposing the change, promising “better ways” to recycle, and ultimately the initiative was defeated. Since then, no promised “better way” has appeared. Recycling in Massachusetts has stalled.
Meanwhile, around the country and the world, new container deposit laws have been enacted for more than 350 million people, and still, others have modernized their laws with great success. When Oregon updated its Bottle Bill in 2017 to include more types of beverage containers and a 10-cent deposit, the redemption rate jumped from 64% to 86% over the span of two years. Likewise, since updating its extensive container deposit law in 1990, Michigan has seen the redemption rate rise to 89% and its waste stream reduced by 6 to 8% each year.
In response to growing piles of litter and waste in the commonwealth, state Rep. Marjorie Decker and state Sen. Cynthia Creem have filed an updated Bottle Bill (H3289/S2149) which will cover nips, water bottles, and more container sizes and types of beverages, and increase the deposit from 5 cents to 10 cents. With this bigger, better Bottle Bill, we could more effectively clean up our roadsides, reduce plastic in our rivers and waterways, and stop burying or burning our beverage containers in landfills and incinerators.
Updating the Bottle Bill is one of many steps we must take to move away from our throwaway, single-use culture. The facts show that deposits on containers reduce waste and litter, and improve our communities. As with any big problem, there's no one silver bullet. But with an updated Bottle Bill, we don’t need to start from scratch or build anything new. We just need to double down on what already works: the tried-and-true recycling success of the Bottle Bill.
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