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The Container Recycling Institute (CRI), Culver City, California, hosted a webinar last week to present legislative updates on container deposit laws (CDL), or “bottle bills,” in various states.
The webinar featured speakers representing Rhode Island, Hawaii and Maine and summarized updates in California, Connecticut, Iowa and New York.
Rhode Island
Rhode Island, a state that does not have an official bottle bill, has been working to introduce one for years. Jed Thorp, Clean Water Action’s Rhode Island director, said that although the last 10 years have lacked a concerted effort to pass a bottle bill, a statewide coalition was formed in January to address the issue. The growing coalition, made up of environmental groups, watershed groups and land trust councils, has made passing a bottle bill its top legislative priority.
“We got a lot of momentum this year. We got a lot of press coverage,” Thorp said. “It was certainly an issue that was in the public eye [and] something people were thinking about and talking about, which hadn’t really happened in years past.”
Thorp said hearings in Rhode Island’s House and Senate were positive, but opposition from the beverage industry regarding bill specifics resulted in the bill not being passed this year.
Instead, Rhode Island passed a resolution to create a joint legislative study commission to identify a framework for a bill. The commission consists of 18 members, including six legislators and representatives from Washington-based Clean Water Action, Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management, Rhode Island Resource Recovery and the American Beverage Association, Washington. Business owners and retailers are on the commission as well.
“The goal of that study commission is to bring all those interested parties to the table; take a good, close look at the problem; talk about solutions; look at how bottle bills work in other states and other countries; and identify a framework of what a good bottle bill would look like for Rhode Island,” Thorp said.
The study commission will meet through early 2024, with the hope that by March, a future bill will have a clear path to passage.
Thorp said no alternative forms of the bottle bill have been proposed.
Hawaii
Recent changes to Hawaii’s 21-year-old bottle bill have included updates to handling fees. Initially, handling fees were set between 2 cents and 4 cents, based on material type, location and postuse application.
In 2018, the Department of Health contracted Sacramento, California-based consulting firm Crowe LLP to conduct recycling cost studies. The company surveyed all the recycling centers in Hawaii, evaluated their financials and used a labor allocation method to spread the costs among the aluminum, glass and plastic containers to propose appropriate handling fees. Wendy Pratt, managing director at Crowe, said when the fees were first implemented in 2019, the firm determined the prices to be between 2.5 cents to 7 cents per container. As of October, handling fees for metal cans are 3.4 cents, plastic bottles are 4.4 cents and glass bottles are 9.2 cents
Crowe conducts an annual evaluation to determine the changing cost of recycling. This evaluation looks at costs related to labor and transportation; market data related to aluminum, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and glass; and beverage container sales and redemption trends.
“Hawaii is a little unique compared to all the continental states [because] everything must be shipped to Hawaii for sale and then back to the mainland for recycling,” Pratt said. Because of these additional transportation costs, Hawaii looked to California when structuring its bottle bill and created a system where monies go through the state and back out to the recyclers.
Other changes include pilot programs for reverse vending machines and upcoming minimum wage increases, which will increase the labor costs in Crowe’s recycling evaluation.
Maine
Maine made two major changes to its bottle bill this year. In May, an emergency bill, LD 134, was enacted to raise the handling fee, and in July, the state passed a modernization act, LD 1909, which Sarah Nichols, Sustainable Maine director at the Augusta-based Natural Resources Council of Maine, described as a “major overhaul to the program.”
Nichols said many independent redemption centers struggled to keep up with inflation and suffered closures in 2022. To combat this, Maine raised its handling fee for the first time since 2019 from 4.5 cents to 6 cents per container.
The passage of LD 134 hinged on the condition that Maine would commit to modernizing its bottle bill.
“It's effective, but it's clunky and showing its age,” Nichols said of the 45-year-old bill.
Nichols said Maine’s redemption centers historically had between 300 to 600 different sorts, a complicated system that the modernization act seeks to simplify. Soon, redemption centers will only be required to sort by material type and size, greatly reducing the cost of labor and training while saving space and time.
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An elevated cab is one of several features improving operational efficiency at the Macon County Solid Waste Management agency in North Carolina. When it comes to waste management, efficiency, safety and reliability are priorities driving decisions from day one, according to staff members of the Macon County Solid Waste Management Department in western North Carolina. The agency operates a recycling plant in a facility originally designed to bale incoming materials. More recently, the building has undergone significant transformations centered around one machine: a SENNEBOGEN telehandler (telescopic handler).
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An elevated cab is one of several features improving operational efficiency at the Macon County Solid Waste Management agency in North Carolina. When it comes to waste management, efficiency, safety and reliability are priorities driving decisions from day one, according to staff members of the Macon County Solid Waste Management Department in western North Carolina. The agency operates a recycling plant in a facility originally designed to bale incoming materials. More recently, the building has undergone significant transformations centered around one machine: a SENNEBOGEN telehandler (telescopic handler).
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SENNEBOGEN 340G telehandler improves the view in Macon County, NC
An elevated cab is one of several features improving operational efficiency at the Macon County Solid Waste Management agency in North Carolina. When it comes to waste management, efficiency, safety and reliability are priorities driving decisions from day one, according to staff members of the Macon County Solid Waste Management Department in western North Carolina. The agency operates a recycling plant in a facility originally designed to bale incoming materials. More recently, the building has undergone significant transformations centered around one machine: a SENNEBOGEN telehandler (telescopic handler).
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SENNEBOGEN 340G telehandler improves the view in Macon County, NC
An elevated cab is one of several features improving operational efficiency at the Macon County Solid Waste Management agency in North Carolina. When it comes to waste management, efficiency, safety and reliability are priorities driving decisions from day one, according to staff members of the Macon County Solid Waste Management Department in western North Carolina. The agency operates a recycling plant in a facility originally designed to bale incoming materials. More recently, the building has undergone significant transformations centered around one machine: a SENNEBOGEN telehandler (telescopic handler).
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SENNEBOGEN 340G telehandler improves the view in Macon County, NC
An elevated cab is one of several features improving operational efficiency at the Macon County Solid Waste Management agency in North Carolina. When it comes to waste management, efficiency, safety and reliability are priorities driving decisions from day one, according to staff members of the Macon County Solid Waste Management Department in western North Carolina. The agency operates a recycling plant in a facility originally designed to bale incoming materials. More recently, the building has undergone significant transformations centered around one machine: a SENNEBOGEN telehandler (telescopic handler).
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SENNEBOGEN 340G telehandler improves the view in Macon County, NC
An elevated cab is one of several features improving operational efficiency at the Macon County Solid Waste Management agency in North Carolina. When it comes to waste management, efficiency, safety and reliability are priorities driving decisions from day one, according to staff members of the Macon County Solid Waste Management Department in western North Carolina. The agency operates a recycling plant in a facility originally designed to bale incoming materials. More recently, the building has undergone significant transformations centered around one machine: a SENNEBOGEN telehandler (telescopic handler).
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SENNEBOGEN 340G telehandler improves the view in Macon County, NC
An elevated cab is one of several features improving operational efficiency at the Macon County Solid Waste Management agency in North Carolina. When it comes to waste management, efficiency, safety and reliability are priorities driving decisions from day one, according to staff members of the Macon County Solid Waste Management Department in western North Carolina. The agency operates a recycling plant in a facility originally designed to bale incoming materials. More recently, the building has undergone significant transformations centered around one machine: a SENNEBOGEN telehandler (telescopic handler).
The law established a commingling cooperative, which Nichols likened to a producer responsibility organization (PRO). The cooperative will require producers to commingle their information and costs to ensure materials are picked up and redemption centers are paid in a timely manner.
Under LD 1909, all unclaimed deposits turned over to the state will be audited and put toward the program or allocated to support the development of reuse programs in Maine.
Other updates
In October, California passed SB 353 into law, which adds new containers to the program; bases processing payments on the average scrap value from the preceding three-month or 12-month average; and establishes a $60 per ton payment for glass transportation, operations and logistics for rural recycling centers.
This year, California also worked to implement SB 1013, which passed in 2022. Workshops hosted from April through November discussed the regulatory text for the bill’s dealer cooperative and the implementation of its various recycling grant programs.
Connecticut passed SB 895, a modernization of its bottle bill, in 2021, with its implementation occurring in phases. This year, the law was expanded to cover more beverages. This change caused the emergency certification of HB 6671, which immediately excludes beverages containing wine or spirits from the program, as well as containers for “medical food.”
In Iowa, the handling fee went up from 1 cent to 3 cents to keep redemption centers in business.
In October, the New York State Department of Environmental Quality announced a statewide multiagency effort to reduce beverage container fraud related to the state’s bottle bill. DEC said this effort will uncover practices that prevent out-of-state bottles and cans without deposits from being redeemed.
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