Any child who’s ever filled a piggy bank will tell you—little things add up.

Did you know that three billion non-carbonated beverage containers are sold in New York State annually? Let’s conservatively estimate that each container is six inches tall. If you could balance all these water, juice, tea, coffee and sport drink containers end to end, you could stack them to the moon and still have nearly enough left over to wrap around the equator twice. Again, that’s only counting New York State, and over the course of only one year. Currently, less than one quarter of these are recycled. The rest make their way through the waste stream as litter, content for landfills or fuel for incinerators.

That’s a lot of containers, and we’re only talking about the non-carbonated beverage variety. Why do so many of these containers go to waste? To understand, we should look at some history.

On June 15,1982, then New York State Governor Hugh Cary signed the Returnable Container Act (RCA) into law, placing a five-cent deposit charge on all containers for carbonated beverages, beer and malt liquor. Instituted as an anti-litter measure, the RCA currently complements curbside recycling efforts for things like papers, jars and cans. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation conservatively estimates that the law has diverted over five million tons of glass, metal and plastic containers, saving taxpayers millions of dollars in landfill and incinerator fees, as well as recycling processing costs over the past 25 years.

In May 2006, members of the New York State Assembly voted 91-45 in favor of a measure known as the Bigger Better Bottle Bill, which was introduced by Assemblyman Thomas P. DiNapoli and Senator Kenneth LaValle. The new law would have expanded upon the state’s original RCA to include beverage containers for non-carbonated products such as water, iced tea, coffee, juice and sports drinks.

In September, when the State Senate briefly reconvened, the bill (A.2517/S.1290, officially) was not put up for a vote due to lack of support because, according to a spokesperson for Senate President and Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno—who is currently the focus of an unrelated FBI probe—“It’s nothing more than a tax increase. Senators were hearing from their constituents that they already pay enough for their groceries, and it’s not something they want to do.” (The argument that a bottle bill is in essence a tax was made by every bill opponent I contacted. None, when asked, could name another “tax” that is 100 percent refundable.)

Thus, 2006 was the second year in a row that the bill passed by a 2-1 margin in the state Assembly only to die on the Senate floor without a vote.

This means that New Yorkers still don’t have to lay out the nickel deposit on non-carbonated drinks and instead either throw out the containers or recycle them along with other paper, plastic, glass and metal products by putting them out in curbside bins or carting them to collection centers. To many people, it seems odd that these non-carbonated products are not marked for deposit already. If you were to close your eyes, you would find it impossible to distinguish between a can of beer, a can of soda, a can of lemonade, or a can of iced tea—yet only the beer and soda cans require a deposit. A 16-ounce plastic bottle of Diet Coke merits a nickel deposit, a 16-ounce plastic bottle of Aquafina does not.

There’s one born every minute

To understand why this is so, you need to understand how the drink market has changed since 1982. The reason non-carbonated products were not included on the original list was because at the time they represented only a very thin sliver of total beverage sales. Today, that sliver has grown to account for over 25 percent of total drink sales, making it the fastest-growing portion of the market.

Twenty-five years ago, there was a word for people who paid for a bottle of water: sucker. It may still be an apt label, especially when you consider that the EPA stringently regulates the tap water in the US while bottled water suppliers receive only an occasional, cursory check from the Food and Drug Administration. Buffalo’s tap water is checked for bacteria and minerals daily at the treatment facility and on a rotating basis at various locations throughout the city every week. Meanwhile, a Syracuse University study found that one-fourth of the bottled waters they tested contained 10 times the bacterial count of typical tap water.

Think about that the next time you are staring dreamily at a picture of a pristine icy glacier on the label of your bottle of water. The contents may have originated from a “spring” behind the parking lot of a warehouse. Perhaps most ironically, 40 percent of all bottled water starts out as—guess what—tap water. Still consumers line up to buy it, persuaded by convenience, or claims of purity, or as a status symbol at the gym.

It is a marketing triumph that bottled water is everywhere now. The environmental tragedy is that the country now goes through 2.5 million plastic polyethelyne terephthalate (PET) bottles every hour.

And from the perspective of the beverage industry, why not sell the non-carbonated drinks and never have to worry about the bottle again once it has left your warehouse? Why, in fact, should anyone worry?

Because it adds up to more than three billion non-carbonated drink containers per year in New York State, and the figure is growing—that’s why. In 2002, an analysis of litter collected in the Hudson River found that 60 percent of the beverage containers collected were of the non-deposit variety. The American Littoral Society reported similar figures after collecting trash on New York beaches. Keep in mind, these non-deposit cans and bottles account for only 20-25 percent of all beverage containers—yet they account for 60 percent of all beverage container litter.

The fact is that containers worth a nickel are much less likely to be discarded.

Since its inception, the RCA has resulted in the return and recycling of over 80 billion bottles and cans in New York. This has made for less litter on roadsides and less broken glass on playgrounds. A study by the Boston Children’s Hospital found that playground injuries caused by broken glass dropped by 60 percent after Massachusetts adopted its bottle law.

But according to an estimate by the Container Recycling Institute (CRI)—a nonprofit think tank based in Arlington, Virginia—only 22 percent of all water, sports and fruit drink bottles were recycled last year. Contrast this with the roughly 70 percent recycling rate of containers marked for deposit. It is estimated that if the number of recycled water, sports, tea, coffee and fruit drink bottles were increased by 50 percent—or brought up to a level on par with beer and soda bottles and cans in New York—it could save 600,000 barrels of crude oil, and greenhouse gas emissions could be cut by 20,000 metric tons.

Despite these persuasive arguments, and in the face of public support, the New York State Senate decided not to vote on the bill. Why? Let’s take a moment to look at some more history.

A tale of two lobbies

Prior to the 1940s, returnable bottles were commonplace because bottling companies could save money by washing them and reusing them. After World War Two, the steel and aluminum industries that had experienced significant growth during the war effort began promoting metal beverage cans as an inexpensive alternative to glass. Cheap and disposable, this new technology created an edge for national bottlers and breweries—who previously had to pay the cost of shipping truckloads of empty bottles back to the plant to be refilled. With the disposable can, they could just keep cranking out the stuff. During this time, many local breweries began to go out of business—and roadways, beaches, streams and wilderness areas began to display colorful blooms of beer and soda cans, fading or rusting in the sun.

Jenny Gitlitz, research director for the Container Recycling Institute, wrote in a 2004 commentary that in 31 years, between 1972 (when the Aluminum Association started keeping such records) and 2003, over one trillion cans were wasted in the US. That’s 17.5 million tons of cans with an October 2006 aluminum market value of $41 billion lying buried in garbage dumps and landfills across America.

As early as 1953, legislators in Vermont attempted to approve a bottle bill. They were unsuccessful in large part due to the efforts of an alliance between brewers and soft-drink makers, along with people from the glass and metal industries. The same year, businesses involved in the beverage container industry formed a non-profit group called Keep America Beautiful—most famous for its 1970’s Public Service Announcements that featured Iron Eyes Cody, the Native American who was reduced to tears at the sight of litter on the American landscape. A recent visit to the Keep America Beautiful Web site featured a story about PepsiCo, this year’s recipient of the group’s Vision for America award.

PepsiCo has been an active supporter of Keep America Beautiful since the 1960s. While the efforts of Keep America Beautiful are admirable, they do not go so far as to advocate bottle bills, which are clearly shown to be the most effective way to reduce beverage container litter in every state where they exist. Instead, Keep America Beautiful calls litter an “individual behavioral problem,” and suggests that one by one, through example and education, we can become a society where we all take responsibility for our actions and influence others through our responsible conduct. It’s a lovely vision, but sadly not nearly as effective as placing a refund value on bottles and cans. In fact, recycling trends suggest that we, as a nation, are losing the fight to correct this “individual behavioral problem.”

The Container Recycling Institute offers a partial list of bottle bill opponents, nationwide. They are the Aluminum Association, Anheuser Busch, the Can Manufacturers Institute, The Coca Cola Company, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, the Food Marketing Institute, the Glass Packaging Institute, the International Bottled Water Association, the National Association for Plastic Container Recovery, the National Beer and Wholesalers Association, the National Food Processors Association, the National Grocers Association, the National Soft Drink Association and, as discussed, the Pepsi-Cola Company, also known as PepsiCo.

On the bottle bill side, here’s a partial list of supporters: the Defenders of Wildlife, the Garden Club of America, the League of American Wheelmen, the League of Women Voters of the US, the National Association of Counties, the National Audubon Society, the National League of Cities, the National Parks and Conservation Association, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Rails to Trails, the Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited and the US Public Interest Research Group.

Which camp do you imagine spends more money lobbying?

By way of answer, here’s an example: In 1996, $3.2 million was spent by opponents in Oregon to defeat Measure 37—which would have expanded recycling to include non-carbonated drinks. They were successful, despite the $400,000 spent by bill proponents.

Oregon was the first state to enact a bottle bill, in 1972. Over the years, bottle bills have been introduced in all 50 states. In 39 of these states, lobbyists have so far successfully managed to prevent their passage. There have been proposals for a national bottle bill, most recently in 2003 when Vermont Senator Jim Jeffers introduced “The Beverage Producer Responsibility Act”—a recycling plan that had as one of its goals the saving of 53 million barrels of crude oil equivalent (BCOE) annually. That’s enough to power 1.4 million American households per year. This proposal would have put the responsibility for hitting recycling goals on beverage companies, using a national deposit rate of 10 cents per container. It did not become law.

To date, New York remains one of only 11 states to have passed bottle bill legislation. It’s interesting to note that while these states—California, Connecticut, Iowa, Oregon, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Vermont, Hawaii and Delaware—collectively recycle the most beverage containers in the US, they account for only 30 percent of the entire US population. According to CRI, bottle bill states recycle 490 containers per capita per year. The other 39 states recycle 191 containers per capita per year. And yes, it’s safe to assume that residents of bottle bill states drink about the same amount as residents of non-bottle bill states.

Where the unclaimed nickels go

Each of the 11 bottle bill states has its own version of the law, so let’s take a moment to see how it currently works in New York. For non-refillable containers, the “deposit initiator” is the beverage bottler or distributor. The distributor receives a five-cent deposit on each container from the dealer—that is, the retailer—who then passes the cost on to the consumer at the point of purchase. At this point, the distributor is up one nickel on every bottle and can he’s moved out of the warehouse.

Upon redemption, the process works in reverse. The dealer gives the consumer five cents for every can or bottle returned. Dealers in turn receive five cents from the distributor, plus a two-cent handling fee for each bottle or can. At this point, if every single can or bottle were returned, the distributor would be out two cents on every one of them.

But only about 70 percent of these containers complete the circle. So what happens to all those unclaimed nickels? Currently, they remain in the hands of the beverage distributors, or bottlers, if we’re referring to soda. It’s been that way for 25 years.

What the Bigger Better Bottle Bill would do besides extending the nickel deposit to include non-carbonated beverages would be to take the consumers’ uncollected nickels away from the distributors and bottlers and channel that money toward New York State’s Environmental Protection Fund to support municipal recycling and waste prevention programs. Each State DEC region would receive a portion commensurate with the amount collected (or uncollected, as it were) from that region.

An estimate by the Container Recycling Institute indicates that New York State could enjoy as much as $178 million dollars annually as a result. The process of taking those unredeemed nickels for the State is called “escheating.” But talk to any beverage distributor and they’ll tell you they just feel cheated.

Peter Certo, president of Certo Brothers Distributing, says that the Bigger Better Bottle Bill will mean one thing for consumers: a 15-cent price increase for each non-carbonated container we buy. Five cents will be redeemable when the bottle or can is returned; the other dime is made up of the mandatory handling fee of 3.5 cents per container (an increase from the RCA’s current two-cent fee) and two cents for WNY BICS—the third party who picks up the containers—added to the increase that retailers will impose for having to deal with the increased volume of containers. Voila—if you follow that math, 15 cents per container—or a 10-cent increase in consumer cost if you return the container.

Natalia Kokalj, a spokesperson for the New York State Beer Wholesalers Association, echoes this. She also points out that the beverage industry is being unfairly singled out. Why not include all containers? Things like jars of mayonnaise. Well, it might be a good question, but for the fact that mayonnaise jars are not the big problem. Beverages are consumed quickly, but their containers remain. When was the last time a bunch of guys sat around the TV watching football and managed to empty 24 jars of mayo?

“What about the newspaper industry?” asks Kokalj. True, newspapers create waste. Some people reading this article are likely to argue it’s a hazardous waste. Still, 40 percent of the content of the paper you are reading is recycled, and the inks are water-soluble. (If you add that probably 90 percent of my words here are recycled from factual studies, I’d say we’re running at about 130 percent.)

When the original Returnable Container Act went into effect, beverage distributors, being the deposit initiators, were allowed to keep the unredeemed nickels to compensate for the inconvenience of rounding up the returns. They also, it should be noted, raised the price of beverages. One thing is certain: Distributors, bottlers, and retail outlets will not shoulder any costs associated with expanding the bottle bill. If that’s the route New York decides to go, consumers will be made to pay for it. On the other hand, how high can distributors and retailers raise prices before consumers simply start buying less?

Michael Rosen, Senior Vice President, Government Relations, and General Counsel for the Food Industry Alliance, a state-wide not-for-profit trade association that represents all sizes of food stores, explains that the influx of containers that would come with a new bottle law would create “all kinds of problems for supermarkets.”

“There are a number of issues that will have a dramatic impact on supermarkets. The first is that supermarkets redeem more containers than they sell. Typically between 120 and 130 percent. In New York City, supermarkets redeem between 200 and 300 percent. Where will they put the additional containers?” says Rosen.

“A second issue deals with sanitation. In urban areas you’ll have street people who go through parks and trash cans and recycling bins and pick up containers and sometimes sleep with them, but in any event they certainly don’t rinse them out, and containers come back to us with all kinds of infestations.”

What are some typical infestations? “We find everything from mice and small rodents to insects. So what does the government want us to be: a food store or a recycling center? We can do one or the other, but we can’t do both well.”

For the record, NYPIRG cites a survey of health departments in every bottle bill state indicating that there have been no reported incidents of health code violations, nor any documented cases of transmission of infection due to deposit systems.

So what are the alternatives?

Senate Majority Leader Bruno’s spokesperson says that there are effective municipal curbside recycling programs already in place. However, research shows that the incentive created by imposing a deposit on containers causes return rates to increase by 50 percent. In the case of Michigan, where the deposit is 10 cents instead of a nickel, the return rate is higher still—over 90 percent of all deposit containers are redeemed year after year. Indeed, there is some discussion that the nickel deposit is less effective than it was 25 years ago because a nickel is worth less due to inflation.

New York Public Interest Research Group spokesperson Laura Haight points out that the reason bottle bills work is that they’re very simple for the consumer. “You pay your nickel, you return the bottle, you get your nickel back,” Haight says. “But behind it there’s layer after layer after layer of complexity with the retailer, the distributor, the bottler—which is why the legislation is complex.”

The fact remains that nothing is as effective as a bottle bill if your goal is to prevent beverage container litter. Speaking to those who oppose the bill, she says, “Show us something that’s more effective, and we’ll consider it. But curbside [recycling] isn’t the answer. Look at Cheektowaga, where they tried [unsuccessfully, in 2002] to get rid of curbside bins.”

In fact, Assemblyman Paul Tokasz, who represented that area, offered another vision in 2005 when he put forth a bill that would have rescinded the original 1982 Returnable Container Act, eliminating beverage container deposits altogether. His plan called for replacing the RCA with a “litter tax” on food, beverages, toiletries, tobacco and other household products. Manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors would have paid this tax to fund curbside recycling and litter control problems. Then it would have been up to us, as responsible citizens, to make sure everything made it to the curb. That bill also failed to make it into law.

“New York City also tried to get rid of curbside recycling,” Haight continues, “Curbside is fine for your pickle jar and your papers, but if you’re drinking your bottle of water, on the go, you’re drinking it because you’re thirsty. And you’re going to throw it out wherever you are.” But if that container is worth money, you may think twice.

Even if you decide the nickel is not enough incentive keep you from littering the container, the original RCA has produced an unexpected group of entrepreneurs. The “street people” described by Michael Rosen are busy on a daily basis, collecting the containers that others—through carelessness, laziness, ignorance or even charity—choose to discard.

Take, for example, Willy. Willy performs this task in many neighborhoods, including mine. He approaches his job with dedication. Two days after the October snowstorm that turned Buffalo into a federal disaster area, while the streets were still choked with tree limbs and snow, Willy came by muscling a shopping cart full of empties. He’s a smallish guy, friendly, compassionate and hearing impaired. For us, he provides a service. We have no problem letting Willy take our bottles and cans for the nickels, and he’s also been teaching my daughter and I some basic sign language. She, for example, can sign “beautiful flower.” I can now order a bourbon and coke from any deaf bartender. I asked him what he makes doing it. Willy signed and said: “Forty or 45 [dollars] on a good day.”

In New York City, people in Willy’s line of work are called “canners” and it’s estimated there are over 1,000 of them. Moreover, they are starting to stand up for their rights. The current bottle law requires stores that sell beverages marked for deposit to accept 240 returns per person per day, or $12 worth of containers. Some stores have set their own arbitrary limits, however, based on storage space or other issues that make it desirable to limit the presence of canners on the premises. Some of these stores (CVS and Rite Aid among them) have faced penalties as a result.

According to picturethehomeless.org, the Canners Committee “addresses a root cause of homelessness—the economic obstacles to generate a living-wage income. It targets the stigmatization of these subsistence workers, fights to ensure that the law protecting these workers is enforced, works to end the criminalization of canners, and highlights the disparities between what the poorest workers earn and the cost of housing.”

To lessen the burden on stores in New York City, however, the expanded bottle bill contains a provision allowing stores to limit the number of containers returned per person, per day to 72 from the current 240. Because the new bill would also expand the range of containers that canners could collect, one can picture a bottleneck building up, unless more collection centers appear.

In fact, the increased handling fee would be an incentive to start more independent collection centers. Also, the expanded bill would create a beverage container recycling assistance program through the Environmental Protection Fund with grants for nonprofits, municipalities and small businesses to open collection centers.

These two key points would apply state-wide. A church, for example, could set up a collection center and keep the increased 3.5-cent handling fee per container. If church members were to donate their deposit containers as a form of tithing, the church would make 8.5 cents per container while helping to save the environment.

Aside from diminishing litter, it’s important to realize that these containers themselves have an intrinsic value—greater than the value of the fluids they contain. They should not be buried underground or burned, releasing greenhouse gasses in the process. Aluminum is particularly well suited to recycling, and PET—the plastic in which most soda, water and sports drinks are packaged—is commonly shredded and reduced to PET flakes, which can be used as the raw material for products that would otherwise be made of polyester: things like fleece, pillows, carpeting, synthetic lumber—or new PET bottles. Around the world, the market is growing for PET flakes, particularly in China. It’s a short leap to imagine that if more flakes were readily available, more of it could be recycled into useful products here, fostering growth in that industry.

The politics

As far back as 2002, Eliot Spitzer has been a strong advocate of the Bigger Better Bottle Bill. Now that he is governor, a spokesperson tells Artvoice that he continues to support the bill and will push for its passage. He may introduce the expansion of the bottle bill in his executive budget to be announced January 31. Also considered crucial is the outcome of a February 6 special election on Long Island to fill the State Senate seat vacated by Republican Michael Balboni, who Spitzer tapped to be his security czar. The new governor is hopeful that Nassau county Democrat Craig Johnson will win that race over Republican Maureen O’Connell, and is calling on voters who support his plans for sweeping change to cast their vote to send Johnson to the Republican-controlled State Senate. Observers say this race could break a state record for most money spent on a special election—costing more than $4 million.

Albany Times Union columnist Fred LeBrun told Artvoice that Senate Majority Leader Bruno is “adamantly opposed [to the Bigger Better Bottle Bill] because he is the spokesperson, really, for the business and corporate community. He has not let [the bill] out of committee for two years. And he will try not to again this year but he will have less to say about it if Mr. Johnson wins and not Ms. O’Connell. So it is definitely a race to watch.”

At a grass-roots level, Ann Zagare, Project Coordinator for NYPIRG at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, indicates that the group will be ramping up efforts to inform citizens about the issue and urging them to contact their legislators as the debate progresses this year. They’ve designated February 27 as “Bigger Better Bottle Bill Lobby Day,” an opportunity to contact legislators to voice support of the measure.

It’s more than reasonable to assume that the Bigger Better Bottle Bill will not pass without a strenuous fight. The change will be hard for some heavy hitters who’ve been fighting these laws for many decades and who’ve successfully put a cork in the bottle bill for the last two years in the State Senate.

It is likely these opponents will again employ negative messages—calling the deposit a tax, citing health concerns for supermarkets, pointing out the expensive complications involved in re-collecting the containers they’ve sold to consumers and insisting they’ll have to drastically inflate the cost of non-carbonated drinks just to pay for the added responsibility of dealing with the recollected containers and to offset the revenue lost when the state escheats all the unclaimed nickels. It’s also a safe bet that bottle bill opponents will introduce alternative legislation—just about anything to keep from facing the role they continue to play in introducing these containers into the waste stream.

If the past is an indicator, bill opponents will continue to spend vast sums to dodge the fact that the 12 ounces of water we drink in a matter of minutes comes in a PET bottle—made from virgin petroleum—that will not degrade in a landfill for 1,000 years.

But despite the complications—and there will be many, including how to sort large, square plastic juice containers that won’t fit into round, automated receptacles for plastic soda containers and cans—it must be recognized that we can do a much better job dealing with the growing volume of our own beverage container waste. Bottle bills have proven to apply the incentive necessary to make us do just that. The result, far from being a tax, is in fact an investment in our environment, our state and our collective future. A child can tell you that.

Bottle bill proponents cite a prophetic quote made way back in 1980 by Dwight Reed, then president of the National Soft Drink Association, who reflected on the issue this way: “Society is telling us in unmistakable terms that we share equally with the public the responsibility for package retrieval and disposal. This industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the attempt to dispute, deflect or evade that message. It is interesting to speculate on the state of our public image, and our political fortunes, had that same sum been devoted to disposal or retrieval technology.”