Redemption, never easy, could be harder with expanded bottle bill

It might sound like a good idea: Expand Connecticut's bottle bill to include a deposit on water and other non-carbonated beverages. Encourage recycling. Clean up the roads. Earn money for Scout troops.

Who could argue with that?

Your local grocers, for one.

"The bottle bill is a real sore spot," said Robert LaBonne Jr., president of the LaBonne's grocery chain, which has a store in Salisbury. "We're severely opposed to it. It's easy for people to just make changes, but I don't know if they've investigated the impact on the supermarket industry."

In addition to requiring a deposit on any beverage bottle 2 liters or smaller (excluding paper containers and milk bottles), the bill increases the deposit from 5 cents to 10 cents and requires that retailers with a business place of 100,000 square feet or greater have a redemption capacity of 70 percent of their sales capacity. Businesses under 100,000 square feet have the option of using an off-site redemption center if they cannot reach the required capacity.

"We don't have the space to store the stuff," Joseph "Skip" Trotta, owner of Trotta's in Sharon, said. "We're going to have to bring in more machines because these machines won't take a 32-ounce juice bottle."

LaBonne, too, is concerned that he will have to build extra space onto his store to handle the increased redemption load.

Another issue that the grocers are quick to bring up is the mess that is made by the returned bottles.

"You're supposed to wash them, but nobody does that," Trotta said. "There's wigglies in them. There's cockroaches in them, there's everything in them."

LaBonne agreed.

"Water's one thing, but when you get into juice bottles, the sugar is going to attract ants," he said.

Both retailers talked about the need to pro-actively spray their stores with insecticides to keep the pests from the bottles out of the area where food is being handled.

State assemblymen insist, however, that adding a deposit to all beverage bottles will increase recycling.

"Right now our recycling rate is not even 30 percent," said state Rep. Roberta Willis (D-64), a member of the Environmental Committee. "If we change to redemption recycling, we’re hoping to get it to 66 to 70 percent."

Opponents of the bill claim that curbside recycling is much cheaper than collecting bottles at grocery stores. While that may be true, towns in the Northwest Corner don’t have curbside programs.

"That's not available in our area," Willis said. "In fact, in our area, we don't even have curbs!"

Willis added that the distributors will be required to report how much they have in "eschetes" - unclaimed deposits - and that the state will double the handling fee paid to the stores that handle redemptions. The increased handling fee is intended to help offset the costs to the stores of handling an increased volume of returns.

At the moment, there is no plan to collect the eschetes money from the distributors. Willis said that the Legislature has seen a number of bills over the years that propose to collect the eschetes money and use it toward recycling or other state programs, but the idea of the state taking the money from the distributors is very controversial and no such bill has been able to win approval.

State Sen. Andrew Roraback (R-30) said that he is inclined to support the bill, but that he has some concerns about the impact on small businesses.

"I have a very small purveyor of water in Torrington, a very small mom and pop operation," he said. "They provide fewer than 5,000 cases a year of water. I want to make sure that the bill doesn't put him out of business and take away his livelihood. It's a very complicated thing for a little guy."

The grocers, too, remain unconvinced. Trotta says the money doesn’t add up. He points to Maine as an example. According to Trotta, Maine has a 160-percent redemption rate. People living along the boarder of Maine and New Hampshire, where there is no bottle bill, can buy bottles in New Hampshire and redeem them in Maine, making a profit on their purchase.

"Supermarkets have to buy garbage from nondeposit states," Trotta said. "Connecticut is surrounded by three states that don't have a juice bottle law. You can buy a bottle in Millerton with no deposit and bring it to Sharon and get a nickel for it."

Trotta also expressed concern for the local transfer stations. If people begin taking their water and juice bottles to grocery stores, the tonnage the transfer stations handle will be decreased.

Transfer stations pay for disposal based on the tonnage of solid waste they handle. However, they offset those costs by selling recyclables such as bottles, plastic, metal and paper. A decrease in income from bottles could increase the rates the townspeople pay to use the transfer station.

Trotta also believes that the prices of the beverages will increase. He said that when New York passed a bottle bill, his store in that state sold Genesee beer for 99 cents for a six-pack. After the bottle bill came into effect, the price on that six-pack rose to $1.49 within a year, an increase of 50 percent.

"It's going to raise the price of juices because Ocean Spray, for instance, is going to have to handle the bottles," he said.

Food retailers statewide are opposing the bill. Protesters include the Connecticut Food Association, which represents all food stores in the state and is spearheading a grassroots effort to oppose the bill, and the Connecticut No Water Tax Coalition (www.noctwatertax.com). But Roraback feels certain the bill will pass the Senate.

"I supported it two years ago and I'm inclined to support it again. Its fate will rest in the House of Representatives," Roraback said, adding, "If the bill passes, I want to do everything in my power to make it as easy as possible for those that take the redemptions."