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Plastics, glass, metal recyclers unite in call for joint EPR, bottle bills

Screenshot of a Rhode Island legilslative hearing

Steve Alexander, president and CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, testifying at a Dec. 9 Rhode Island legislative hearing along with Scott DeFife of the Glass Packaging Institute, left, and Scott Breen of the Can Manufacturers Institute.

Plastics recyclers and PET resin maker Indorama are part of a coalition urging Rhode Island to adopt a combination of a bottle bill and extended producer responsibility law, calling it the best shot at reaching high container recycling rates and greener packaging.

The Association of Plastic Recyclers, along with associations for the metal and glass packaging industries, told the state's Joint Legislative Commission to Protect Our Environment from Plastic Bottle Waste that conditions are "ripe" for the U.S.'s first joint deposit and EPR program.

Such a dual program would get container recycling rates to at least 80 percent, the business groups argued, a huge jump from the 33 percent nationally for PET bottles and 43 percent for aluminum cans.

"The best results at the lowest cost come from doing [deposits and EPR] together," said Scott Breen, senior vice president of sustainability at the Can Manufacturers Institute in Washington. "We want to work with Rhode Island lawmakers and stakeholders to create a law that would make Rhode Island a leader, a pioneer in the United States and the world.

"We are ripe for a U.S. state to take that on and do it in a modern way that addresses a lot of the fair concerns that I know a lot of the people on this commission have," Breen said.

Steve Alexander, president and CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, also testified at a Dec. 9 commission hearing as part of the Coalition for High Performance Recycling, a group that includes APR, CMI, the Glass Packaging Institute and others in the metals, glass and PET container supply chains.

He told lawmakers and business and environmental groups who sit on the commission that a combination of EPR and "recycling refunds," as the group calls container deposits, would boost collection and allow beverage and food brands to meet their commitments to use recycled content packaging.

"The states with the highest recovery, by far, of PET bottles are those with deposit programs. That's just a fact," Alexander said, adding that the PET bottle recycling industry could handle much more material, if it could be collected.

"We can recycle three times the amount of plastic bottles today," he said. "We have the capacity. What we don't have is the supply."

Failing to increase the supply of recycled PET could give consumer product companies cover to abandon their previous commitments to use recycled plastic, Alexander said.

"We're giving them an excuse to back away and not use recycled material, because at this point the demand is at least three times for recycled content — for the PET industry, the soda bottle industry, the water bottle industry — vs. what we can supply," he said.

The coalition, which also includes Indorama Ventures North America, the International Bottled Water Association and Niagara Bottling, is drafting legislation, said Scott DeFife, president of the Glass Packaging Institute.

Some legislators and others on the commission voiced concerns about whether consumers would see deposits as price increases. They also addressed the potential for negative impacts on retailers imposed by some bottle bills systems that require stores to set aside space for redemption centers, process deposits and handle dirty bottles.

They also asked about financial losses that local recycling programs could face if valuable containers are shifted away from curbside systems.

But DeFife said the coalition is factoring that into its plans. He and others said a bottle bill allows consumers to get their deposits refunded, if they return the container for recycling.

"No one's yet proposed the kind of program that we're working on, kind of a new modern take on this version that alleviates a lot of the concerns and doesn't impose all the costs on retailers that previous systems have imposed, and that takes into consideration the financial situation at the state and local level," DeFife said.

One of the co-chairs of the commission, state Rep. Carol Hagan McEntee, D-Narragansett, said the group has heard repeated concerns about bottle bills from supermarkets and other stores during the past year during meetings. She characterized the commission as at a "stalemate" on the issue.

"We are business friendly and we want to be business friendly, but sometimes this bill takes on the look of not being business friendly," she said. "We have to convince businesses, this isn't bad for business."

Another co-chair, state Sen. Mark McKenney, D-Warwick, said that while no new bottle bill laws have passed in the United States in several decades, he suggested Rhode Island should look to countries like Lithuania that have passed more modern deposit return systems since then.

"One of my questions is, are those models we can work off of? For example, when we look at Lithuania, which as I understand it really started from scratch in 2016, and to my knowledge, has been extremely successful," McKenney said.

In his opening comments, Alexander emphasized to the commission that APR represented plastics recycling companies, rather than the plastics industry more broadly.

"We're not the plastics industry. We're the enemy of the plastics industry," Alexander said. "We are not the chemical industry. We are people who recycle plastic every single day."

While the panel did not discuss their lobbying in other states, Breen told Packaging Dive earlier in December that the high performance recycling coalition plans to push for EPR and recycled refund policies in 2025 in "strategic states," including Illinois and Washington.

Some of the recycling coalition members are also part of an informal group, along with environmental groups, that met with lawmakers and executive agencies in Washington in February to push for a national bottle bill. That group included Indorama and the PET Resin Association.

* Source : https://www.plasticsnews.com/news/plastics-glass-metal-recyclers-call-joint-epr-bottle-bills

* Edit : HANDLER