Hawaii Moves Closer to Passing Bottle Bill

The Hawaii House and Senate moved closer to resolving their differences on the bottle bill, legislation to establish a 5-cent redemption fee and 2-cent handling fee on a beverage container.

Sen. Lorraine Inouye offered a new Senate proposal to reduce the handling fee to half a penny effective July 1, 2003.

The state, she said, is likely to accumulate more funds than it needs through the handling fees and unredeemed nickels as it may take a few years to achieve the expected 80 percent recycling rate.

The Department of Health, which is expected to administer the funds, was asked to run the revised rates and see if the plan would be workable.

Some state officials cautioned that the half-a-penny charge will bring in a kitty of $4 million to the system while the state would have to pay recyclers at $14 million a year to collect the containers.

"I don't know how to make up the difference," said Gary Gill, deputy director, environment division, Department of Health. "Recyclers are not going to participate unless there's enough money in it for them."

The beverage industry, which has spent millions to defeat recycling programs on the mainland, convinced the Legislature not to pass any recycling bill last year by promising to draft in time for this year's session its own recycling bill with terms the industry would willingly support.

That proposed bill, however, turned out to put the financial onus on the state, and was rejected by lawmakers. Since then the industry has been lobbying against a recycling bill.

House and Senate negotiators yesterday agreed to a new version of the bottle bill that would impose a nickel deposit on most bottles, cans and plastic beverage containers beginning in 2005. Those deposits would be refunded to consumers when the beverage containers are returned for recycling.

House Bill 1256 would also phase in an additional charge of up to $.01 per beverage container that the state Health Department would use to subsidize the recycling industry. When fully phased in, that charge would raise about $12 million a year, and would not be returned to consumers.

Opponents of the bill, however, say that the bottle bill would affect 2 percent of the waste stream, while generating $26 million for the state.

That $26 million estimate is based on container fees that will be collected and nickel deposits the government will get to keep when consumers fail to return their beverage containers for recycling, according to the Hawaii Advertiser