Support a National Bottle Bill

Deposits on beverage containers are not a new idea. The deposit-refund system was created by the beverage industry as a means of guaranteeing the return of their glass bottles to be washed, refilled and resold.

When a retailer buys beverages from a distributor, a deposit is paid to the distributor for each can or bottle purchased. The consumer pays the deposit to the retailer when buying the beverage. When the consumer returns the empty beverage container to the retail store, to a redemption center, or to a reverse vending machine, the deposit is refunded. The retailer recoups the deposit from the distributor, plus an additional handling fee in most U.S. states. The handling fee, which generally ranges from 1-3 cents, helps cover the cost of handling the containers.

The costs to distributors and bottlers can be offset by the sale of scrap cans and bottles and by short-term investments made on the deposits that are collected from retailers. In addition to this income, distributors and bottlers realize windfall profits on beverage containers that consumers fail to return for the refund.

An average of 350,000,000 beverage bottles and cans are sent to landfills, incinerated, or littered every day.  This represents 40-60% of all litter.  In 2006, less than half of the 100,000,000,000 aluminum beverage cans purchased were recycled, resulting in the waste of 800,000 tons of aluminum. Nine of ten plastic water bottles, 30,000,000 bottles a year, end up as garbage or litter, where they take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.

A national system for requiring a refund value on the sale of all beverage containers would provide a positive incentive to individuals to clean up the environment, and would result in a high level of reuse and recycling of such containers and would help reduce the costs and environmental dangers associated with solid waste management and container manufacturing.