Although no state bottle bill has ever been repealed, the beverage industry's well-funded campaigns have been extremely successful in stopping new bottle bills or the expansion of existing ones.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 20 years to pass a bottle bill -- in large part, because, during that time, industry opponents have spent tens of millions on anti-bottle bill propaganda, outspending proponents by as much as 30 to 1. Hawaii's program, although not yet implemented, is already under attack from the business community. 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 HB 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. In Connecticut, a coalition of businesses, environmentalists, labor leaders, and charitable organizations continues to block attacks on the state's 26-year-old bottle bill. 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 -- and the cost -- out of their hands and into the hands of taxpayers. 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 system for beverage containers, complemented by curbside and drop-off systems for other products, including food containers, newspapers, cardboard, mixed paper, and yard waste. 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.

Ran 8/23/04