For the Updated Bottle Bill

The national beverage industry is at it again. They’re trashing the Massachusetts Bottle Bill with $8 million worth of ads about what Question 2, the Bottle Bill update, would do for recycling and the environment. A recent Boston Globe article said the ads contained “false” and “inaccurate statistics”—or what some of our friends call “malarkey.”

So what’s the real story?

If you’re as old as we are, you’ll remember that just over three decades ago, Massachusetts voters decided to reduce litter and increasing recycling by approving the original Bottle Bill. Almost overnight, we started returning beer and soda bottles and cans for recycling—and litterbugs found a new incentive to stop trashing our environment. It was a big win for our environment, and it worked.

Back then, though, beer and soda were about the only drinks that came in single-serve containers. The Bottle Bill covered all of these bottles and cans, and we recycled the vast majority of them. Today, when you walk into a CVS or Cumberland Farms, what do you see? Bottled water, sports drinks, and other non-deposit beverages—which barely existed 30 years ago—have taken over the store shelves. Only about a quarter of those bottles get recycled.

That’s a billion bottles of Poland Spring, Gatorade, and other beverages that each year are ending up in landfills—or by the curb outside your house, in the park where the neighborhood kids play, or on the forest trail where you go for a hike on the weekend. And in recent years, as the number of containers has increased, the recycling rate has fallen.

After seeing or hearing those industry ads a few dozen times, you might think curbside recycling is the answer and that somehow updating the Bottle Bill is competing with that agenda. That is, in a word, absurd. The Bottle Bill and curbside work together. Think about it: If you have curbside, it’s an easy way to recycle. If you don’t have curbside or need a little more incentive to recycle, you can bring back your bottles and get your deposits. Even if you were a lazy litterbug (unlikely, given that you’ve read this far), someone else might well pick up your discarded bottle to get your deposit back.

In fact, since we passed the Bottle Bill, curbside recycling has grown in our state: Though curbside was once only available in a handful of cities, 47 percent of all Massachusetts cities and towns now provide curbside programs. And here’s an inconvenient truth the ads entirely omit: Curbside recycling has grown in part because unreturned bottle deposits have gone to fund recycling programs.

The simple truth is that if we update the Bottle Bill to include sports drinks, bottled water and other non-deposit beverages, we’ll keep about 72 million pounds per year of trash out of our environment, divert massive amounts of petroleum, the main ingredient in those plastic bottles, from being tossed, and build on a familiar system that Massachusetts residents have known and used for more than 30 years.

By the way, another simple truth the ad people hope we ignore? We get our bottle deposits back. That’s why it’s called a “deposit.”

The Bottle Bill is the best recycling program we’ve ever had, and updating it will keep even more bottle and can trash out of our lives. So the next time you hear one of those ads, take a deep breath and remind yourself what the Bottle Bill has really meant for your community, your parks and playgrounds, and your favorite beaches and forests.

Then resolve to vote “Yes” on 2. Let’s not fall for the beverage industry’s malarkey. Let’s update the Bottle Bill so it works even better to clean up our streets and parks, improve recycling and keep Massachusetts beautiful.

Janet Domenitz is the executive director of Massachusetts consumer group MASSPIRG. Phil Sego is an advocate at the Massachusetts Sierra Club.