Spring Break
The Daily OrangeSen. Bruno botched N.Y.'s Bottle Bill
By Kevin Eggleston
Posted: 4/14/08, 10:50 PM EST Section: Opinion
Plastic, plastic everywhere, those bottles never shrink; plastic, plastic, everywhere, the remnants of your sports drink.
Were Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write his masterpiece today, his Arctic-stranded crew in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" would not be salivating over a salt-water ocean. Instead, it'd simply head below deck and drink its fill of Gatorade and Poland Spring.
"But what to do with the bottles?" the crew might wonder. It'd check the label for a deposit, and finding none, toss them into the sea.
Sound familiar? Replace sailors with students and the deep blue sea with a dirty green dumpster, and there's no doubt it happens countless times every day here at Syracuse University. Across New York State, the situation is even worse.
The reason that cola cans, beer bottles and other carbonated beverages can be returned for a deposit in New York - and newfangled items like water bottles and sports drinks cannot - has mostly to do with timing.
New York's current bottle bill is ancient. Passed in 1982, it failed to predict and address the recent phenomenon of our bottled-water obsessed culture.
These days, without a legislated deposit on non-carbonated beverages, only 10 percent of water bottles are recycled, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. That means more than 90 percent of the 2.5 billion bottles of water sold in New York State every year end up as unnecessary trash - and as any highway driver knows, not all of it ends up in a landfill.
To address this problem, the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) has been pulling out all the stops to get a Bigger Better Bottle Bill passed in the New York State legislature. The bill would not only expand the bottle deposit to include non-carbonated beverages like juice and water bottles, but also force bottle distributers to turn over millions in unclaimed deposits to the State Environmental Protection Fund.
As NYPIRG's bottle bill advocate Chad Brooker said, the group has been holding almost daily meetings with assembly members and state senators in order to finally get the bill included in the 2008 state budget.
Were Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write his masterpiece today, his Arctic-stranded crew in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" would not be salivating over a salt-water ocean. Instead, it'd simply head below deck and drink its fill of Gatorade and Poland Spring.
"But what to do with the bottles?" the crew might wonder. It'd check the label for a deposit, and finding none, toss them into the sea.
Sound familiar? Replace sailors with students and the deep blue sea with a dirty green dumpster, and there's no doubt it happens countless times every day here at Syracuse University. Across New York State, the situation is even worse.
The reason that cola cans, beer bottles and other carbonated beverages can be returned for a deposit in New York - and newfangled items like water bottles and sports drinks cannot - has mostly to do with timing.
New York's current bottle bill is ancient. Passed in 1982, it failed to predict and address the recent phenomenon of our bottled-water obsessed culture.
These days, without a legislated deposit on non-carbonated beverages, only 10 percent of water bottles are recycled, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. That means more than 90 percent of the 2.5 billion bottles of water sold in New York State every year end up as unnecessary trash - and as any highway driver knows, not all of it ends up in a landfill.
To address this problem, the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) has been pulling out all the stops to get a Bigger Better Bottle Bill passed in the New York State legislature. The bill would not only expand the bottle deposit to include non-carbonated beverages like juice and water bottles, but also force bottle distributers to turn over millions in unclaimed deposits to the State Environmental Protection Fund.
As NYPIRG's bottle bill advocate Chad Brooker said, the group has been holding almost daily meetings with assembly members and state senators in order to finally get the bill included in the 2008 state budget.
Viewing Comments 1 - 3 of 3
Catherine Burke-Plumadore
posted 4/15/08 @ 9:56 AM EST
Even if there's no deposit, the bottles can still be recycled. On campus, it's a matter of putting the bottle in the slot marked "plastic," or "bottles" rather than the one marked "trash" in those rectangular, beige receptacles. (Continued…)
paul
posted 5/06/08 @ 2:22 PM EST
If this so called bigger, better, bottle bill is truly about the environmnt then these so-called envirinmentalists would not need the unclaimed deposits. (Continued…)
J
posted 5/13/08 @ 1:05 PM EST
This is just a tax on consumers in two ways: (1) Beverage companies are going to have to re-coup their increased costs - guess how - by increasing the price of their products; (2) Keeping the unclaimed deposits for the environmental groups is so more property can be purchased by them - and guess what - taken off the tax roles. (Continued…)
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