Oct. 31 marked the first anniversary of New York’s expansion of its beverage container deposit law to include bottled water. According to a news release issued by the Container Recycling Institute (CRI) and New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), “While it is too early to measure the full benefits of the new law, state and national recycling advocates are hailing the first year as a success.”
“Consumers have adjusted easily to the expanded bottle bill, and it is already delivering on its promise of a cleaner and healthier environment,” says Laura Haight, senior environmental associate with the NYPIRG. “It has also created new jobs for small businesses and generated critically needed revenue for the state.”
In 2009, New York State updated the Returnable Beverage Container Act, adding water bottles to the list of beverage containers requiring a minimum 5-cent refundable deposit. Under the new law, beverage companies are now required to transfer 80 percent of the unredeemed deposits to the state General Fund. Prior to the revision to the law, beverage companies kept unclaimed deposits. In addition, the new law increased the handling fee for retailers and redeemers to 3.5 cents per container from 2 cents, which was established in 1997. The expansion went into effect on Oct. 31, 2009, after a five-month delay due to a lawsuit from the bottled water industry.
According to Haight, who cites Taxation and Finance data, in its first year of implementation, the state of New York has collected more than $120 million in unclaimed deposits from the expanded bottle bill, which is on target with the state’s budget projections of $118 million. The number of registered redemption centers that take back empty containers grew by 113 centers in 2009 and by 131 centers as of October 2010. Many of these small businesses have been able to expand and increase their employees’ wages and benefits, Height says.
Nationally, plastic recycling got a significant boost in 2009 in light of the expansion of bottle laws in New York, Connecticut and Oregon to include bottled water, according to the CRI and NYPIRG.
Susan Collins, CRI executive director, says, “We are seeing excellent growth in recycling rates in the container deposit-refund programs around the country. The expansions in New York, Connecticut and Oregon added nearly 4.5 billion containers to deposit programs and have the potential to increase the nation’s overall beverage container recycling rate by 2 percentage points.”
Collins adds, “PET reclaimers in the U.S. are hungry for this material. They are busy building new plants in the U.S. and can staff them with new employees as long as the materials are available to them.”
A statewide survey of retailers conducted by NYPIRG in February 2010 found widespread compliance with the new law. Ninety-three percent of retailers surveyed accepted water bottles back for redemption, and seventy-five percent of the stores only sold properly labeled water bottles. The only widespread compliance problem documented by the study was 74 percent of stores failed to post the signage required under the new law notifying consumers of their rights.
While the state of New York has not yet collected its annual survey data on beverage container sales and redemption for the period since the expansion went into effect, Collins says that in Oregon, which added a deposit on water bottles Jan. 1, 2009, the quantity of rigid plastic containers collected increased 18 percent from 2008 to 2009. Oregon’s 2009 Material Recovery and Waste Generation Rates Report says this “likely shows the effect of including water bottles” in that state’s container deposit-refund system. Nationally, PET recycling rates increased 1 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to the National Association of PET Container Recovery (NAPCOR) and the Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers (APR.).