A bottle bill that REALLY matters
by George SeldesApril 4th, 2007 at 10:23:38
You should all be supporting the expansion of the bottle bill–although the eventual bill there will be flawed and fall short, it’s a giant step in the right direction to get water bottles under the bill and to get a task force going to start updating the procedures.
Take action: call your senator and representative and ask them to SUPPORT SB-707. You may also take action online by visit the Onward Oregon Action Center.
HOWEVER, that’s not what I want to talk about.
Much more important than the important SB-707 is HB-2626, which would GET E-waste out of Oregon’s landfills by creating an extended producer responsibility system–just like we have for soda bottles, car tires, and car batteries–for computers, monitors, laptops, and televisions.
Here’s the thing in a nutshell: E-waste is just like a plastic bottle, except each piece of e-waste is a huge plastic bottle filled with toxic heavy metals and organic chemicals that is guaranteed to leak and put those metals and chemicals into our drinking water.
Think about it: How many empty plastic bottles would weigh the same as a 5-pound laptop or a 75-pound tv or 17″ monitor?
Now imagine filling each one of those many bottles with a share of the metals and toxics contained within the monitor or CPU and dumping them all in the landfill WITHOUT lids. That’s what we do whenever we put e-waste in a landfill–we send a giant uncapped bottle full of lead and other toxic into a place where rain and acids created by decaying matter will wash through the plastic cases (which are not sealed, and wouldn’t remain so even if they were) will leach the toxins out and mobilize them.
That’s your drinking water folks. That’s the groundwater that gets in your wells and in the wells that farmers use to irrigate. That’s the water that animals drink.
So if you think keeping empty plastic bottles out of landfills and streams is important, then how much more important is keeping these big plastic bottles full of toxins out of those same landfills and streams!? A million times? 10 million? A lot, for sure.
Electronics makers will fight, just like tire makers and bottle makers, but we must not lose this fight. There are millions of toxic e-waste bottles ready for disposal right now, and every computer upgrade makes more and more. The new high definition TV standard is coming, and that will unleash a FLOOD of dead TVs onto the landscape. WE MUST ACT NOW or forever regret it.
So, yes, call and ask your legislator to support SB-707, but make sure to stress how much more important it is that they support HB-2626, the E-Waste Recycling Bill.
You can take action online by visit the Onward Oregon Action Center.
For more info on HB-2626, click link here:
http://www.recyclingadvocates.org/e-waste_recycling.htm
April 5th, 2007 at 8:00 am
Well thats nice if you dont fill something in right it erases all you’ve wrote! The Problem IS THE STORES WILL ONLY TAKE $7.30 A DAY, THIS IS OUR PROBLEM! THEY SAY ITS OLCC LAW. IS IT? OR ARE THEY LIEING. I CANT EVEN GIVE BOTTLES AWAY AND WHAT ABOUT BOTTLE DRIVES FOR KIDS! THIS IS OUR FIRST CONCERN BECAUSE RAISING THE DEPOSITS MAKES NO DIFFERENCE YOU CAN STILL ONLY CASH IN 7.30 A DAY. IM READY TO TROW THEM IN THE GARBAGE AND IVE NEVER CONSIDERED THIS EVER! IM THAT IRRITATED WITH IT. I WOULD BE OK WITH THE RAISE IF THE REAL PROBLEM WAS FIXED FIRST! OBVIOUSLY WHOEVER CAME UP WITH THIS HAS NEVER RETURNED BOTTLES AT A STORE THEMSELVES HUMMMMMM. THANKS FOR LISTENING I HOPE THIS SENDS YOU IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION THE HOMELESS WONT EVEN TAKE THEM BECAUSE THEY MET THEIR QUOTA FOR THE DAY! HOW STUPID IS THAT !!!!!
April 5th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I just received your organization’s email asking me to support the new bottle bill. However, I have a couple of problems with this.
First, did you poll your membership or subscribers to see how THEY felt about the bill? Frankly, when you send me an email telling me to do something, I get a little defensive. It’s not like I had a voice in the PROCESS, yet you assume that you can tell me that this is what I must support. I reject that arrogant attitude.
Second, have you considered the impact of this legislation on low-income people in Oregon? Not only do you advocate an increase in the deposit amount, you also advocate broadening the types of containers eligible for the deposit. The ‘double-hit’ on low-income people will result in a reduction of disposable income first because of the deposit increase, and second because more containers are covered by the proposed legislation.
If the objective is to keep the items out of the landfill, then broadening the range of containers covered by the legislation makes good sense. Increasing the deposit does not.
Lastly, I agree with the previous post that the limits for daily redemption are restrictive and must be revised upward in the new bill or the impact of the legislation, whether enacted with only the increased deposit or the broader definition of containers applicable, or both, will be negligible on what admittedly is becoming a blight on, and danger to, our environment.
In the future, try utilizing consensus of your supporters to form policy instead of trying to pass off your vacuum-ideated proposals as the will of the people.
April 5th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
P.S. I went to the Action Center page, because of your advocacy on e-waste, so that I could learn more about the issue and email legislators on the pending bill, if I chose to do so. Unfortunately, I could find no information there…only information on the bottle bill. I searched around your site a bit, through the archives and such, and still found no info on the e-waste issue.
I wouldn’t recommend putting a link in your blog to a topic, if there’s no content on said topic at the other end.
Peace out, y’all.
April 5th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
James, thanks for your comments and your willingness to take action on E-waste. It’s my fault that I chose the “take action” link when there wasn’t an action task defined on that page–I thought of it as a generic prompt to highlight “Call your legislators.” Now I see how that was wrong and learned something about how the site works. Sorry.
I am going to leave the responses re: the bottle bill to others because I really don’t have a lot of interest in the bottle bill, compared to the e-waste bill. I personally think the compromise out there is a net benefit, but it’s definitely a compromise in the ugliest sense, with some ugly provisions for sure. Not the bottle bill I would have written, and probably not the one you would have written either.
I will similarly leave for others in the Onward Oregon collective a response on how action items are chosen. I’m just a blogger here, trying to jump up and down and point to things that I think would make Oregon better (so far, E-waste recycling and the IRV option bill). Greater minds than mine will have to grapple with the issue you raise about deciding on which issues become action items.
BUT, all that having been said, please call your legislators and ask them to get behind HB 2626 so Oregon can get an E-waste recycling system going. That’s what I meant by “a bottle bill REALLY worth supporting” (Don’t know if you read my whole post, but I think of e-waste as toxics-filled bottles, rather than simply glass or plastic bottles or aluminum cans. If we can capture all those low-value bottles and cans then we darn sure ought to be able to keep much more highly toxic and high value e-waste items out of our water, yes?)
April 5th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Followup to previous reply: here’s what I first said about E-waste:
_Here’s the thing in a nutshell: E-waste is just like a plastic bottle, except each piece of e-waste is a huge plastic bottle filled with toxic heavy metals and organic chemicals that is guaranteed to leak and put those metals and chemicals into our drinking water._
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:47 pm
I, too, whole-heartedlt support HB 2626. Yet I find that recently, my concern and sense of urgency regarding plastics (bottles, bags and much more) has increased dramatically. A recent, very well presented articel on the front page of the Oregonian, pointed out the cost and destruction involved in making any and all things plastic. The amount of oil and natural resources used inthe making of a plastic bag (we’re not even talking about the plastic in bottles, bins, baby toys, boxes, and your big electronics!) is astronomical. Plastic packaging, plastic throw away, food containers, plastic car parts, plastic everything is drinking oil and natural resources at an astounding rate. Whether or not to encourage more recycling is not in debate. WHat is lesser known is the cost to our environament to MAKE plastic items. Disposing of them is another thing altogether. Though your blog points out that both SB707 and HB 2626 are important, you argue for a time, that there’s a trade off; that one is less important than the other. I encourage you to discover through more research, what it is costing us in resources and oil to make and dispose of plastics. It floored me and I have no doubt, it will, you, as well.
Mary Cummings
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Mary, thanks for your comment. I can’t argue with anything you said; it’s more a difference in emphasis.
In “Crude Awakening,” (new movie about peak oil), they point out that the oil needed to make a computer weighs ten times as much as the computer itself, and surely a lot of that is in making the plastics. Just as aluminum is often known as “congealed electricity” (because of how much electricity is required to smelt the raw materials), plastic could be called “hardened petroleum.” So I’m hip to the oil-plastic connection.
I just happen to think that the market handles the plastic v. glass tradeoff much more intelligently than it has handled E-waste disposal to date.
If I made you think that I oppose the plain vanilla bottle bill, that’s my mistake. I definitely support it; I was not at that point so optimistic about the E-Waste bill, and I was trying to get people to compare the two. It is certainly true that I want them both; but it’s also true that if I could only have one, I’d have the E-waste bill. The rising price of oil will begin to encourage more plastic recycling no matter what. The same would not be true with E-Waste, so while I applaud your investigation and agree with your sentiment, I still maintain that the E-Waste bill is the more critical of the two.