The cooler case may feel
warmer now than it has in recent
years, but don’t blame a
faulty thermostat. Blame the fire
stoked by environmentalists and
beverage industry lobbyists in
their fight over bottle deposits.
Battles over disposable packaging are nothing
new to the beverage industry, to be sure, but in
recent years two things have changed to bring
them back onto the public agenda. First, there’s
the sheer size of the beverage industry – it has
added billions of bottles of water alone into the
waste stream in the past decade. The second is a
public that hasn’t been this environmentally hyper
since the publication of “Silent Spring.”
As a result, modern consumers are on the
warpath when it comes to pushing companies
to minimize the negative effects their products
have on the environment. The public’s interest
in bottle bills is spawned by the same “inconvenient
truths” as their interest in carbon
neutrality and recycling: the fear that society’s
waste could, at some point, via global warming
or some other environmental disaster, render the
world uninhabitable.
To their credit, beverage companies have
responded to their Al Gore-educated consumers
by publicly exhibiting their own, individual
green credentials. Coke and PepsiCo have
made commitments to recycling and carbon
footprint reduction. Anheuser-Busch is playing
up its own environmental bona fides. But
as a unified industry, leaders continue to fight
bottle deposit initiatives.
“Singling out beverage containers just doesn’t
address the problem,” said Tracey Halliday, director
of communications for the American
Beverage Association.
Still, the industry is starting to have some
defections, as environmentally minded (or simply
profit-seeking) beverage companies – particularly
in the bottled water crowd, which owes
much of its success to a marketing approach that
stresses its purity and natural aura – are starting
to break ranks. Fiji Water, to name one large
example, recently stirred the pot by looking to
endorse bottle bills and announcing its intent to
go carbon negative.
Currently, 11 states use bottle deposits to encourage
their residents to recycle beverage containers.
Most of those states passed their laws
in the 1970s and 1980s before last century’s
first environmental movement ran out of steam.
But the proposals have returned in recent years:
legislators in seven non-deposit states and the
U.S. senate are considering what a nickel could
be worth to the environment, and legislators
in four states with deposits want to expand
their programs.
Environmentalists are sounding a call to action
in each of those battlegrounds, emboldened
by recent victories in Hawaii and the Pacific
Northwest. The Aloha state instituted a deposit
system in 2005, and Oregon is scheduled to expand
its older version in 2009. With that momentum
and the current value consumers place
on environmentally friendly practices – a recent
survey by A.C. Nielsen revealed that more than
half of the consumers polled would give up convenience
for environmentally beneficial packaging
– why shouldn’t retailers and beverage companies
embrace bottle bills?
Ask that question and the flamethrowers
come out. According to Halliday, deposits levy
a discriminatory tax on an industry that produces
only 4 percent of waste streaming into
municipal landfills.
“(Bottle deposits) only look at one element of
the waste stream,” Halliday said. “They’re not
addressing the overall problem.”