Message in the bottles

As Michigan’s 10-cent deposit law turns 40, environmentalists and store owners agree the state needs to get better at recycling

By Patrick Sullivan | Dec. 17, 2016

The law responsible for Michigan’s famous 10-cent deposit on bottles and cans turned 40 this year (and the “Seinfeld” episode that makes fun of it turned 20), but that doesn’t mean the debate over its scope or effectiveness has been settled.

Environmentalists say the measure has been an unqualified success and want the bill expanded to include all kinds of beverage containers. Bottled water, for example, was unheard of in 1976 and is now the fastest-growing drink category in the country, on pace to outsell soft drinks this year.

Grocers, however, don’t like the law and in particular don’t like empty bottles and cans returning to their stores; at least one northern Michigan store owner wants to see the bottle bill crushed.

“Even if you’re fervently environmental, you have to see that this is just a terrible law. It had good intentions in its infancy, but it’s like a child that never grew up,” said Brad Anderson, owner of Anderson’s Market in Glen Arbor. “It’s just the bane of my existence.”

STORES BECOME RECYCLING CENTERS

Anderson ticks off the reasons why he dislikes Michigan’s bottle deposit law, which he says essentially forces people to bring garbage into his store.

The bottle bill was meant to rid the state’s highways of garbage.

“It’s job was to get litter out of our roads and forests and streams, and it’s done a really good job at that,” said Kerrin O’Brien, executive director of the Michigan Recycling Coalition.

Anderson counters that today the law encompasses such a small portion of containers sold in stores that it’s no longer responsible for keeping the state clean. Roads are kept clean nowadays by adopt-a-highway programs, he said. Anyway, the vast majority of people no longer throw garbage out of their windows as they drive, he said.

Anderson also contends that the law puts public health at risk.

“The health department goes through here every three months, but they don’t even look at these,” Anderson said, referring to the reverse vending machines where customers bring bottles and cans. The return area is just feet away from the back of the deli where sandwiches are prepared.

Anderson said having to collect returnables in the store creates a health hazard because the empty bottles and cans arrive dirty and still partially filled with beer or pop. They come back filled with cigarette butts or regurgitated chewing tobacco or dead mice, he said.

“This is a health and safety issue,” he said, though he acknowledges that he has no firsthand knowledge of disease or illness spread as a result of returned containers.

Linda Gobler, president and CEO of the Michigan Grocers Association, said she’s heard of an instance in the past few years when a store closed because of a noxious chemical in a returned container. She said there have been a couple of instances of employees getting stuck with needles while handling bottles and cans, but she said she is not aware of any incidents that have been documented.

“I think what people fail to understand is that most of the containers that are coming back into the stores are not clean, sanitary containers,” Gobler said.

A 12-PACK OF REASONS

The value of the 10-cent deposit is much less today than it was in 1976. If deposits would have kept up with inflation, they’d cost 42 cents today, according to the Consumer Price Index inflation calculator.

Even if a dime isn’t worth what it was 40 years ago, the amount remains motivational. In 2014, the redemption rate for returnables was 94.2 percent; that means $351.1 million in deposits were redeemed. The money that’s not redeemed is split up by the state — 25 percent is returned to retailers, and 75 percent goes to the Michigan Cleanup and Redevelopment Trust Fund to clean pollution and contamination.

Anderson believes some resistance to repealing the bottle bill exists because the state has come to rely on its slice of the unclaimed bottle return funds.

Anderson said his store sells a half million returnable bottles and cans per year, and around half that number is returned to his store. He said the refund he receives from the unclaimed fund does not make up for the employee hours that to go into sorting and getting rid of 250,000 returned bottles and cans each year.

What’s more, as the years have gone by, the deposit law has grown more complicated. When it was passed, store coolers were full of Budweiser and Miller. Lowenbrau was exotic — it was brought to North America from Germany by Miller in 1975 with an Americanized recipe. Today there are thousands of microbrews, and a single store might sell hundreds of them. Stores are only required to accept containers that they sell, but knowing what’s sold at some stores is beyond the pay grade of the clerk at the register. That’s created an industry of reverse vending machines that scan barcodes, crush cans and sort containers.

Those machines cost $20,000, Anderson said, and they require a lot of maintenance and use a lot of electricity. Anderson said the law also doesn’t make sense to tourists because sometimes two containers can appear to be the same but only one is returnable. Anderson said visitors bring empty wine bottles to his store all of the time.

“Tourists come in, and they don’t understand what’s recyclable and what’s not,” he said.

COMPREHENSIVE RECYCLING

Greg Reisig, chairman of the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council, said NMEAC wants to see bottle deposits spread to more kinds of beverage containers, like bottled water and energy drinks.

“This has been a very successful law and has led to greater recycling rates and cleaner roadsides,” Reisig said. “Michigan lawmakers should build on this bill and make it more expansive.”

Democratic lawmakers have proposed expansions to the law. A Senate bill was introduced in March 2015 and a House bill in April 2016 that would have broadened the deposit law to noncarbonated drinks.

Neither bill got any traction or even received a hearing, said Mike Berkowitz, legislative and political director for the Michigan chapter of the Sierra Club.

Anderson, meanwhile, said it would be crazy to thrust greater recycling responsibilities on small grocery store owners. He said he believes the state should scrap its deposit law and create a comprehensive recycling program that would work with waste haulers to ensure that garbage is sorted and recyclables stay out of landfills. That would increase recycling rates and lead to more green jobs, he said.

That echoes the position of his industry lobbying group — the state would be better off instituting comprehensive curbside recycling so that everything that can be recycled gets recycled, not just beer and pop bottles and whatever people chose to put into recycling bins, said Gobler, of the Michigan Grocers Association.

Gobler said her organization has been lobbying for a better recycling policy in the state. She said despite the bottle bill, Michigan lags behind other Great Lakes states in overall recycling rates.

Gobler, who serves on the Governors Recycling Council, an initiative launched by Gov. Snyder to look at ways to boost recycling, said the MGA’s objective isn’t to eliminate the bottle deposit law, but rather to get grocers out of the bottle and can recycling business.

“We are very much in favor of a more comprehensive recycling program for the state of Michigan,” Gobler said.

IN 1976, A DIFFERENT FIGHT

Lynn Jondahl said he is wary of grocery or drink manufacturer lobbyists who talk about comprehensive recycling centers — that was one of the arguments they made against the bottle bill when it was up for a vote in the first place.

Jondahl, who represented East Lansing in the Legislature for 22 years and who ran for governor in 1994, spearheaded the bottle bill legislation that led to the 1976 referendum.

There had been a couple bills that hadn’t gone anywhere when Jondahl was approached by a 15-year-old East Lansing high school student who had written a bill based on one that had passed in Oregon. Jondahl said he ran the bill past lawyers and determined it was sound. He decided to propose it, and that led to a firestorm of opposition from industry groups.

When the bill failed to get out of committee, Jondahl decided the only way deposits would become reality was if he went directly to the voters.

He said it was easy to collect the signatures needed to get an initiative on the ballot. The first person to sign a petition was then-Gov. William Milliken, the Traverse City Republican who became an ardent supporter of the law.

A lot of grassroots groups and churches circulated petitions; one of the biggest supporters was the Michigan United Conservation Clubs, which had typically limited its activism to hunting and fishing causes.

Bottle manufacturers funneled millions into the Committee Against Forced Deposits while environmentalists took to the roadsides to sweep discarded bottles and cans into piles to prove to passers-by the need for deposits.

A front-page syndicated column by William F. Buckley in the Record-Eagle in the weeks before the election demonstrated just how different society was in 1976 — union officials bitterly opposed the bottle law while the state highway commissioner campaigned for it, arguing it would save the state millions it spends to clean its roads.

Buckley quoted the director of the American Can Company, who compared littering to drunk driving in a bizarre argument against the proposal: “As long as the fine for drinking while driving is greater than the fine for littering, people are going to throw empties out of their cars.”

Jondahl is proud of the act and says it accomplished what it set out to. He said it wasn’t as comprehensive as it should have been because supporters had to make compromises in order to win.

Today, Jondahl is disheartened by the direction of recycling policy.

A measure passed on Dec. 1 by the state Senate prohibits localities from regulating or placing a tax on plastic shopping bags, for example. Jondahl said that’s in a spirit that runs opposite to what he tried to do 40 years ago.

He said it’s getting harder and harder to launch environmental initiatives, even for measures with broad public support.

“It is not encouraging,” he said. “If it got to the vote, I’m pretty confident on most of these issues that the voters would be supportive. But getting there is more than half the trouble.”

A RECYCLING REVOLUTION

Michigan’s recycling policy and infrastructure may be on the verge of a revolution. What the bottle bill looks if that revolution happens is anyone’s guess, said O’Brien, of the Michigan Recycling Coalition.

But what the bottle bill has done without question is demonstrate that consumers can be motivated to recycle, she said.

O’Brien said the MRC saw an opening with the Snyder administration to improve Michigan’s recycling policy in 2011. Her organization released a report on the value of the state’s solid waste that ended up in landfills that estimated that if the state could recycle half of what was thrown away, Michigan would see an annual $435 million economic benefit through resource recovery.

That report prompted Snyder to form the Governor’s Recycling Council with the goal of raising the state’s recycling rate from 15 percent to 30 percent, O’Brien said.

O’Brien said she is encouraged with the council’s progress. But when the council — which is made up of interests from across the political spectrum — releases its final report, it will be up to state lawmakers to improve recycling policy.

“The big challenge will be selling this to the Legislature,” she said. “We’ve never had an opportunity like we have right now to move things forward. But it’s going to take anyone who has an interest in this issue reaching out to their legislators, reaching out to their local decision-makers.”

LESSONS FROM FLINT

The material covered under deposit represents 2 to 3 percent of the state’s solid waste stream, but it makes up 10 to 11 percent of recycled materials.

The 10-cent deposit encourages recycling of bottles and cans, but does it discourage further recycling? It might indirectly, because the aluminum and PTE plastic that get recycled under the bottle bill are some of the most valuable recycled material in the market, O’Brien said.

The bottle bill removes those valuable materials from curbside recycling containers, which makes the material not covered under the bottle bill less attractive to recyclers.

Also, anecdotally, O’Brien has heard that some consumers believe they have done their part once they’ve returned their bottles and cans.

“I have heard people say they think their recycling is done when they take their recyclables to the store,” O’Brien said. “Nobody’s ever really studied this, so nobody knows.”

Jan O’Connell, the Sierra Club’s development director, said she believes the bottle bill is responsible for an ethos against littering in the state.

“I can remember before, I mean, these things (bottles and cans) were just everywhere on trails,” she said. “I do see some of the water bottles now. I’ve noticed some in lakes and streams, but I think now there’s a mindset with the bottles, with the bottle bill.”

There are many reasons why Michigan needs to overhaul its recycling policy somehow, O’Brien said. Look at Flint, where a lead poisoning crisis has forced thousands of residents to live off of bottled water.

That’s made the city a case study in the challenge posed by plastic water bottles to a recycling regime.

Flint has opt-in curbside recycling, and it is not equipped to handle families that today use dozens of bottles of water just to make dinner, O’Brien said. The lightweight bottles overflow the blue recycling bins.

“They’re so light, if they’re put in the bins in any quantity, they’ll blow out, and they’ll wind up in waterways,” O’Brien said. “It is an absurd picture when you think about it.”

The state needs a revolution in the way it views recycling, O’Brien said.

“Solid waste management — recycling, composting — is really infrastructure development and really, it should be seen as a utility,” she said. “Everybody produces garbage.”