It’s time to get rid of bottle deposits.
Bay State proponents for an expanded bottle deposit bill suffered a lopsided loss on Tuesday: More than 73 percent of voters said no. That marked a stunning turnaround: As recently as mid-August, polling showed 62 percent favored “updating” the law so that it would also cover non-carbonated beverages. After grocery chains and the beverage industry started running their well-funded ads, however, sentiment rapidly shifted. The referendum was crushed by a margin of 40 points.
So do proponents give up the ghost? They’ll resist it. For one, they’ll point to the imbalance in spending. The “yes” folks put perhaps a million dollars into their effort. The opposition spent about eight times as much. Then too, they’ll point to the industry’s misleading ads, especially one which asserted that 90 percent of all Massachusetts residents have access to curbside recycling. The correct figure is 64 percent. Absent such a misrepresentation, they’ll say, they could have had a chance.
Perhaps. The bottle bill proponents may have been outspent, but they were also beneficiaries of an enormous amount of free media, myriad endorsements (including the Globe’s), and active support by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. Moreover, the opponents’ misleading ad earned a raft of bad press, hurting perhaps as much as it helped.
It wasn’t merely money and ads that sent the expanded bottle bill to defeat. 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.
So what happens now? It’s a safe bet that Massachusetts legislators are not about to introduce and debate a similar bill. The voters have spoken loudly and clearly; elected officials cross them at their peril. And if bottle deposit advocates want to make another run at a referendum, they’ll have to wait six years — until 2020. (The state constitution requires such a waiting period once a measure has been defeated by voters.)
So do we just stick with the status quo? Advocates were absolutely correct in one thing: 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.
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.
Ideas like these have been around for a while, introduced in the Legislature and then dying silently in one committee or another. The pessimist in me fears similar inaction this time around. Proponents are doubtless feeling miffed and not in any mood to cooperate while the beverage industry is flush with victory, thinking it doesn’t have to do anything. That would make for a missed opportunity on the part of both sides, however. Bamboozled or not, voters shot down the expanded bottle bill because they believed recycling is a better approach. With a new governor in pace and a change in leadership at the state Senate, perhaps it’s possible to rally environmentalists and the beverage industry around innovative solutions for a persistent problem — one that, the referendum’s results notwithstanding, still needs to be fixed.
This column was first published in The Boston Sunday Globe on November 9, 2014.