Although no state bottle bill has ever been repealed, the beverage industry's well-funded campaigns have been extremely successful in stopping new bottle bills or the expansion of existing ones. Hawaii recently became the first state in 16 years to pass a bottle bill -- in large part, because, over the last 20 years, industry opponents have spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-bottle bill propaganda, outspending proponents by as much as 30 to 1. In 2001, the Grocery Association spent thousands to kill Iowa's bottle bill, claiming that returning a beverage container to a grocery store was a threat to public health -- an argument that was quickly refuted by the state's department of public health. Another argument commonly used is that return-deposit systems should be dumped in favor of government-managed curbside recycling programs. Industry prefers curbside recycling because it places responsibility for recycling beverage containers out of their hands. However, in states without bottle bills, curbside recycling, drop-off, and buyback programs together recover only 191 beverage containers per person per year, compared to 490 containers per person per year in deposit-return states. The ideal system is a deposit-return system for beverage containers, complemented by curbside and drop-off systems for other products, including food containers, newspapers, cardboard, mixed paper, and yard waste.

Update (June 11, 2003): Bottle bills continue to be threatened by lobbyists representing beverage distributors, grocery/retail associations, and other well-financed special interest groups. Fortunately, however, their recent efforts have been largely unsuccessful. Last month, Oregon's bottle bill -- the three-decade old law that spurred the introduction of several similar bottle bills across the country -- came very close to being undermined by lobbyists advocating the agendas of beer and wine distributors. Their weapon was House Bill 3637, a measure that would have permitted the practice of sending recyclable bottles to landfills in the absence of an economic incentive to recycle them. California, Maine, and Hawaii have all been successful in making positive amendments to their bottle bills, expanding the list of containers that are suitable for recycling in an effort to reflect modern trends in beverage consumption. The Legislatures in Massachusetts and New York are currently in the process of making similar updates to their own bottle bills.

Ran 1/21/02, 5/20/02, 9/16/02