Passing the casino’s buck, sinking the bottle bill, and throwaway living: The high cost of not redeeming more bottles

By Kathleen Willis Morton

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At the end of the last senatorial session the Bottle Bill wiped-out in the Ways and Means Committee sunk under the weight of a controversial Casino Bill, which was a recycled issue from a year ago, where they both crashed and got rag-dolled in the whitewash.

Now we’re all taking a greater gamble that the world’s oceans will stay safe, fishable, and recreational against increasing research that has many thinking the odds are they won’t.

The Great Garbage Patch in the Pacific Gyre is a floating dump twice the size of Texas swirling with seven million tons of plastic waste. In this patch, which disperses over an area estimated to be larger than the United States, there is six times more plastic then plankton in water samples.

Birds and mammals are more likely to ingest plastic than food and are dying of malnutrition. Recently, another patch has been discovered in the Atlantic. When I say plastic I mean mostly single-use nonessential plastics. No motorcycle helmets, car-seats, or major medical equipment has been found.

Some plastics are indispensable and lifesaving; that’s not the specious of plastic proponents are protesting. What has been found in quantities too numerous to count is single-use plastic bags, caps, wrappers, and mostly bottles! What’s needed is discretionary, responsible use of plastic products and elimination of utterly useless ones. Just discontinuing use of plastic shopping bags and redeeming bottles that will be recycled instead of thrown away will stop the predominate flow of plastic into the ocean. Those two things can make a difference, and we’d be more than halfway to solving the Great Garbage Patch problem.

Using less plastic bags and recycling are small redeeming actions that offset indulgences. The Bottle Bill could have had a major impact. It’s a huge incentive for people to not throw away a bottle worth money. Encouraging people to recycle is one thing. To actualize that happening in the hand of the consumer is placing an immediate value on that encouraged action. Bottling companies need to do their share, so do we, and so does our government. What will turn the tide is if we can figure out how to do it without shifting focus and accountability, and without blaming; buck up and change how we consume, what we throw away, and what in our culture we decide is more disposable.

The marketing slogan in 1955 when plastics emerged was “Throwaway Living” – just throw it away and go on with your day was the idea. Ironically, we may be on our way to doing just – throwing away living healthy. Every molecule of plastic that was ever created from plastics first inception still exists today. They have been incinerated into atmospheric pollution, and degraded into sub-particles that now mingle with every ecosystem.

Plastic is 100 percent non-biodegradable. Fish ingest these particles they act as sponges for other toxins. We consume fish (and other products made with sea by-products, toothpaste for example). There is no preceding generation that has been exposed to this amount of ingestion and exposure to plastic, so there is yet no way to know what it is doing to the human species. Infertility, autism, cancer, early onset of puberty have risen dramatically. Who knows?

Am I the only one who remembers the ad of the Native American standing by the river full of cans, bottles, and trash with a tear running down his face? Isn’t it a shame I can’t remember who produced the ad and for what purpose? Effective change won’t come from popcultural-izing a campaign. Reduce, reuse, recycle. I like it, I try to live it.

But, we can say it till we’re blue, and embroider it with hemp on our faces, and it will have less impact then hard, cold change would have: a five cent redemption deposit on all beverages–the purposeful expansion of the bottle bill. A mandate made 27 years ago in a less polluted world should still make since in a world now predominantly polluted by bottles that did not exist — non-carbonated drinks: bottled water, high-octane caffeinated “crack juice” (love that stuff!), and sports drinks– and have now glutted the market. 1.6 cents would have been the cost to the beverage companies to take the bottles back after we consumers have redeemed our five cent deposit.

Eighty percent of carbonated drinks, which are redeemable, are recycled. Less than 25 percent of non-carbonated drinks, which are non-redeemable, are recycled. Over one billion bottles sold each year are non-redeemable. Fenway Park filled to overflowing is the amount of bottles that end up discarded; keeping 80 percent of those out of the landfills and water would have made a huge difference.

The Bottle Bill is dead in the water. For years it rode the political wave and unfortunately, didn’t make it into the “barrel”– the “Green Room”. But, there is always another wave, another session. The issue of redemption will pop-up again. In the meantime, pass me my hemp thread; reduce, reuse, recycle–keep the bottles out of the blue!

By the way, those little cans of soda I liked so much that all the beverage companies seem to be shifting to. I noticed recently they’re not redeemable either! Maybe soon the bottles and cans that are covered under the current Bottle Bill won’t exist either and all beverage containers will flow downstream again. Cue crying Native American from years ago. There has got to be a way for us to have our yummy drinks and indispensable ocean’s too. It’s not solely consumer’s fault or the conglomerate’s fault, but it’s our mutual responsibility. Senators need to stop passing the buck allowing bills to be short-shifted by inclusion in legislative packages that are already destine to take a dive and mediate a way to expand redemption and recycling into a sustainable legislation so the outlook on our oceans’ future will be a good bet that it won’t shift for the worse.

Kathleen Willis Morton is the author of The Blue Poppy and The Mustard Seed: A Mother’s Story of Loss and Hope, by Wisdom Publications, teaches at Grub St. Inc, and is a member of the MA Surfrider Foundation. She can be reached at www.thebluepoppyandthemustardseed.com