Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn is pushing for a “bottle bill” for Illinois named “I-can”. He wants to implement a deposit & refund system for beverage bottles and cans. Such a program might seem like a nice idea on the surface since most people believe that recycling is the right thing to do and it makes them feel good. The truth is that recycling programs are almost always failures and are often worse for the environment. Recycling in general causes more pollution and wastes more energy than creating new bottles, jars, boxes and paper. So-called bottle bills do more harm than good. Bottle bills concentrate on bottles and cans, so I’ll do the same.
Under the program consumers are charged a 5 cent per item deposit, which they get back when they turn in the containers. The beverage distributors are forced to pay an additional 2 cents per item into the state program fund. The 2 cents is paid to the collection centers. The first problem is that Pepsico, Coca-cola, Budweiser, Nestle, Quaker, and so are not going to give up that 2 cents willingly, so they will turn that cost over to the consumer. So the program will steal 2 cents per item from the distributor, who charges the consumer, and hands it to the collector, this is government mandated redistribution of wealth. What’s more is that the overhead and operation cost of the collection centers is approximately 1.5 cents per item, for a .5 cent per item net. But isn’t it worth it if it benefits the environment? Perhaps, except that with the exception of aluminum cans, recycling does not benefit the environment. The cost of collecting, sorting, cleaning, and processing plastic and glass is substantially higher than the cost of producing new containers. Quinn states that plastic bottles are made of 95% virgin petroleum and so recycling would reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The problem here is that plastic bottles are not recycled into new bottles. They are made into cheap clothing, carpet, and other such plastic based materials. It is simply too expensive make bottles from bottles. The amount of oil used to produce bottles is a drop in ocean compared to the amount of oil used for fuel. Some may remember the days when 16 ounce soda bottles carried a deposit. Those programs run by the bottlers, not the government, were scrapped because making a new bottle, glass or plastic, was far less expensive than sorting, hauling, inspecting, and cleaning the old ones.
But what about my curb-side recycling program? Quinn says that his bottle bill would not interfere with municipal recycling programs. Yet information found on and through his website state exactly the opposite. Recycling programs survive solely on aluminum cans, if they are succeeding at all, most are not. They lose money on paper, plastic, tin, and glass. Quinn’s program would remove the cans from the municipal programs and remove any potential profit. Quinn says it would create jobs. People are needed to sort, and clean the cans and bottles. But who pays for those workers? The bottle bill won’t. The consumer and the taxpayer will. In States with such programs, trash collection costs have risen, since it is the disposal companies that operate these facilities, or they use subsidies to pay for the additional workers, either way the public loses. Plus the curbside program will likely remain because the bottle bill doesn’t include tin, paper, or glass and plastic from other sorts of containers like milk jugs or food jars, only beverages.
Some people choose on their own to recycle cans. And at around 30 cents per pound why not? It takes about 30 aluminum cans to equal a pound, that’s about 1 penny per can. That’s better than the .5 cents per can the collection centers receive. And with the bottle bill it takes all of the profit out of recycling cans for the consumer.
Then there’s the issue of people from out of state, collecting bottles and cans to drop off in Illinois. With the exception of Hawaii, every State with such a program has run into this problem. Residents of States without such a plan are traveling to those that do effectively stealing the deposit money.
There’s just too much garbage and we’re running out of room for it all. The Illinois EPA states that we have only 12 years of landfill space left and we’ll have to start new landfills if we don’t fix this “problem”. But that is exactly what occurs. Disposal companies fill landfills, and when they’re full they start a new one. Non-government research such as by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has found that the United States has plenty of room for its trash for at least 1000 years.
Proponents site that bottle bills have resulted in cleaner streets and less injuries in parks and playgrounds due to broken glass. Well, it doesn’t take a bottle bill to fix that. We could just enforce the littering laws already in effect, or even make them stronger. And if where you live doesn’t have a penalty for littering one could be enacted. Under the bottle bill a person would lose the 5 cent deposit for dropping a bottle on the ground. Yet a littering law could entail a multi-dollar fine for the same act, obviously a more effective deterrent.
The State of New York implemented its program in September of 1983. From that time according to the New York Public Interest Research Group, the State has saved the energy equivalent of 25 million barrels of oil which could provide enough electricity to power all the homes in New York City for one year. They didn’t save that much oil, just the equivalent in energy. In real oil terms, with current United States production levels at a fifty year low, 25 million barrels would take 5 days to replace. This comparison doesn’t include oil imported. So it took New York 22 years to conserve 5 days worth of energy equivalent to domestically produced oil. When New York City suspended its curbside recycling in 2002, saving the city $56 million, Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated, “The fact of the matter was that it was phenomenally expensive, and most of it ended up being dumped in a landfill anyway.”
Municipal recycling programs are failures on almost every account. Cato Institute director of natural resource studies, Jerry Taylor has said “When recycling makes economic sense, government doesn’t have to mandate it or subsidize it. Somebody in the private sector will be happy to pay you for your garbage or, alternatively, charge you less for recycling services than for landfilling services.” If they don’t work at the city level, why try it at the State level? Recycling in general is bad for the environment and costs the consumer an average of 3 times as much over just throwing trash away. Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn wants to force you, the consumer, through a 5 cent per item penalty, to recycle. Such recycling programs have been proven to be not beneficial, often worse for the environment, and to be exceedingly expensive. The only thing in Illinois that needs to be recycled is the office of Lieutenant Governor.
-Eric (Rick) Ferguson, President, Libertarian Party of Will County, Illinois