A day after leaders of Vermont’s business and waste sectors slammed a legislative proposal that would expand the state’s “bottle law,” the Vermont House on Thursday signed off on the sweeping recycling reform.
By adding bottled water, juices, sports drinks, wine and certain craft alcohols to the list of redeemable beverage containers included in the bottle law, lawmakers say H.175 would double the number of beverage containers eligible for redemption, and then recycling, in the state. The bill would impose a 5-cent redeemable deposit on the slate of new beverage containers.
Legislators gave impassioned arguments for and against the recycling reforms in a four-hour debate ahead of the House’s vote.
“We live in a throwaway society, and the volume of waste discarded by each one of us is embarrassing,” Rep. Scott Campbell, D-St. Johnsbury, said on the virtual House floor Thursday afternoon. “This is a step — a small step — toward taking responsibility for reducing our waste stream.”
The lower chamber later voted 99-46 to grant initial approval of the legislation. A final vote is expected Friday, after which the bill would move to the Senate.
First enacted in 1973, Vermont’s bottle law mandated a 5- to 15-cent deposit on some beverages, which people could redeem at stores and redemption centers by returning disposable containers after they were used. The law cut down substantially on littering and helped increase recycling in its early years.
But as new kinds of single-use beverage containers have entered the market in recent decades, environmental groups have pushed the legislature to broaden the list of containers covered by the law. The bottle law was amended to include liquor bottles in the 1990s but has otherwise remained the same as the original 1973 law.
Conservationists have pushed for an expansion on the grounds that it would cut down on fracking and increase the number of new containers made from reused materials. Redeemed containers are cleaner — and thus easier to make into new bottles — than single-stream recyclables.
On Thursday, environmental groups lauded the House’s vote as a win for the preservation of Vermont natural resources.
“These changes to the bottle bill will result in less climate pollution and waste in our landfills and more green jobs,” Jen Duggan, director of the Conservation Law Foundation’s Vermont chapter, said in a press release.
If the Senate passes and Gov. Phil Scott signs the legislation, Vermont would join Maine in having one of the nation’s most expansive lists of redeemable beverage containers. California’s state legislature recently considered substantial recycling law reform in the face of fierce industry pushback.
Advocates say one of the bill’s biggest impacts would be to funnel more waste into Vermont’s “closed-loop” recycling system. As markets like China cut down on accepting single-stream recyclables, placing an incentive on a wider swath of disposable containers will create a greater pool of clean, recyclable waste from which to make new containers, they said.
“That creates that closed loop, which currently is not always happening,” said Rep. Kristi Morris, D-Springfield, who worked on amending H.175 in the House Natural Resources, Fish and Wildlife Committee.
Industry and waste-sector leaders, though, posit that the reforms would not substantially increase recycling, citing a 2013 Agency of Natural Resources report that found that an expanded bottle law would raise the program’s operating costs by around $11 million per year, while increasing the material the state recycles by only about 1%.
Industry leaders protested the legislation publicly and via a surreptitious grassroots-style lobbying campaign that environmentalists criticized as an instance of “astroturfing” last week.
On Thursday, House Republicans voiced worries that the legislation would burden small business owners who would be tasked with processing a new wave of returnable items, and questioned whether they should be obligated to do so.
Under the current bottle law, stores that sell bottled beverages are legally required to redeem the bottle deposit and accept returned containers from purchasers — unless they are in an area with a specially designated redemption center nearby or are able to obtain an exemption.
Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, unsuccessfully tried to introduce an amendment to the bill Thursday that would allow stores to choose whether to participate in the redemption program, rather than being obligated to do so.
“Most places have their own redemption centers, and there’s no reason that these small businesses should be required to take these bottles anymore,” said Marcotte, who opposed the bill.
After the 2013 Agency of Natural Resources report was published, influential national recycling organizations including the Container Recycling Institute and the Glass Packaging Institute questioned its findings in a letter to David Mears, who was serving as commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.
The groups found the investigation understated unclaimed container deposits and was overly optimistic about the benefits of single-stream recycling — which business and waste sector leaders commonly push for as an alternative to bottle law reform — among other alleged errors.
On Wednesday, Glass Packaging Institute President Scott DeFife wrote another letter to House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, urging her to support Vermont’s bottle law reforms.
“Substituting recycled glass and downcycling it into secondary markets, in an effort to conserve ‘domestic sand,’ is not a course of action that would benefit the environment, nor preserve limited landfill space,” DeFife wrote to the House speaker.
Besides increasing the number of containers made from previously used bottles, lawmakers estimate that the expanded redeemables list could spur a $1 million-per-year rise in funds the redemption process directs to the state’s Clean Water Initiative.
All funds that are not returned to containers’ purchasers are directed to that program under a 2018 law signed by Scott.
On Thursday, the governor signaled in an interview on Vermont Public Radio that he would side with business interests if the legislation arrived on his desk.
“I think that there are better approaches,” Scott said. “I think having single-source recycling has been a huge help. So, I think we should expand upon that” rather than expand the bottle law.
Because it missed the Legislature’s March crossover deadline this session, the legislation is unlikely to be taken up by the Senate this year. The Senate could, however, pick up where the House left off next January during the second year of the legislative biennium.
If enacted as drafted, it would take effect in the summer of 2022.
Clarification: This story was changed post-publication to clarify the nature of the redeemable deposit mandated by the bottle law.
