Bottle Bills, or container deposit laws, have proven to be highly effective ways of cutting down the amount of bottles piling up in landfills, polluting the environment:
In Canada, recovery rates for non-refillable beverage containers by provinces range from a low of 67% in Newfoundland to 83% in Nova Scotia.
The problem is that most bottle bills or deposit systems only cover beer and carbonated soft drinks, and do not include non-carbonated drinks such as bottled water, including the Province of Ontario%u2019s current Deposit Return Program which only covers alcoholic beverage containers.
According to an Environment and Plastics Industry Council (EPIC) study, in 2002, Ontario had a 35% recycling rate for plastic beverage bottles, one of the lowest rates in the country. As a result, over 33,000 tonnes of plastic was burned or buried that year alone, releasing toxins into the ground and atmosphere.
This is an environmental problem manufactured by the bottled water industry and the costs are then being shifted onto municipalities that lack the resources to handle it.
