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My closing statement read: "There is only one real effective and incentive method to encourage environmentally sound collecting of beverage one-way containers and it is deposit in combination with High-Tech R&D resulted Reverse Vending Machines!

By Blair Pollock
Extended Producer Responsibility: A Critical Component

As part of our ongoing focus on Plastics Recycling, this week we ask...

If you had the ability to work with and/or counsel the Obama administration on a national recycling agenda, what are the top three things that you believe would be critical components of the program?

The federal agenda should be bent towards creating a nexus of extended producer responsibility (EPR) across the board. In practice this takes various forms. The form I favor most is deposits on ‘everything’ e.g. Sweden has a very large deposit on cars and when your car is ‘done’ you recover the deposit. No junk cars remain on the landscape very long. There was quite a run at a national EPR type bill for computers and peripherals that went nowhere, likewise a national bottle deposit bill despite very well run efforts at involving a national dialog, etc. A national bottle deposit law has languished for years. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) had lowered the proposed deposit from 10 cents to a nickel in his defeated 2007 “Bottle Recycling Climate Protection Act” and in the new one
re-introduced 4/23/09. A nickel won’t do it Gotta be a dime, sorry Senator!

Quoting from Plastics News 4/23/09: “ According to the Container Recycling Institute in Glastonbury, Conn., the recycling rate of carbonated PET bottles in 2006 was 71.2 percent in the 11 states in the U.S. with bottle deposit bills compared to 27 percent in the other 39 states.

Container Recycling Institute (CRI) said that the recycling rate in 2006 for non-carbonated beverages, including water, was 35.2 percent in states with deposit laws and 13.6 percent in the states without bottle deposit laws.

North Carolina used the model of a surcharge for tires and white goods in the early 1990s to fund public county (or city) run programs to allow free recycling of these items. It works very well. There are virtually no more tire dumps in NC and the white goods recycling industry is healthy and well funded. No more white goods dumps either for that matter.

The results of having no EPRs nationally are clear in the national discard stream — huge numbers of cans and bottles are discarded every day. There is no incentive to collect them. We all know that the bottle bill states consistently provide most of the furnish for recycling and those of us in the public sector in states without bottle bills plead and wring our hands to get people to recycle and eat all the costs of away from home recycling with collection services, etc.

There is a horrible and growing hodge-podge of regulations that govern electronics state by state only making that recycling harder. In NC in particular, Dell Computers, to whom NC and Forsyth County gave huge tax incentives to locate here, is now trying to eviscerate an already weak law.

I favor similar EPR on the various items that have been worked on by PSI e.g. carpet, mercury bearing devices, those EPRs would look different from those for bottle deposits or computers.

Of course there have to be physical examples set everywhere, all the time. White House & Congress etc. They are powerful. Recently one grocery store in the regional chain Harris Teeter finally put recycling containers in one of the Orange County NC stores for bottles n cans. Their store’s managers went to a meeting at a sister store and just ‘had’ to take all the empties back to their store to recycle (after only two months of having recycling – regular people can get ‘the bug’

Sound tax policy and nurturing the recycling industry are also elements of successful policy.

How would success of these elements be measured?

The Franklin Institute waste sorts and studies of waste composition are one reliable benchmark. Those massive waste audits by California and Oregon are others. SCS Engineers has a huge data base of waste sorts as do likely other garbage consultants. They can be paid to deliver valuable data.

These data need to be compiled into a national data base and then redone with a standardized protocol that focuses on specific materials that have been targeted. We can’t target everything at once. If in ‘the first term’ it’s just bottles, cans, computers and carpet, the industry has to be enrolled in this to make sure there is accurate measurement of inputs and outputs. With the international trade making it harder to count all the inputs, some sort of inventory system has to be put in place. The truth will lie in the garbage, I believe in Bill Rathje, AJ Weberman and everyone else who’s had their hands in the garbage. Secondary counting won’t be enough.

What key-learning's from other national or international programs would influence your recommendations?

I cited Sweden above for the car deposit. Large deposits on bottles and cans in many European countries have resulted in huge return rates on containers. Many are washable plastic containers. I still have on my desk from a 1996 trip to Netherlands a thirty trip washable PET soda bottle. They will be recovered if they are usable. Washing plants can be made water and energy efficient too so they don’t become environmental albatrosses.

Our work over the past thirty years as a nation on the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act have resulted in measurable gains to the nation’s environment. I was working on a merchant ship along Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River a few years after the famous 1969 fire and can testify it was not yet clean, though it is now (and industry is dead there too though the lake lives). These national bills work and we can believe in the thousands of dedicated environmental professionals who want to make the laws work. Some things do not work as well but it’s more due to an unsustained effort. The national effort at renewable energy was stymied by a lot of political interference. E.g. rescinding the Federal Solar Tax credit in 1982 killed the US solar industry for 25 years. We were at that point in 1981 #1 in the world in flat plate solar thermal collector production. (and there was some fraud too from bad installations we are only now recovering from……)

And finally, what are the mistakes you think we have learned from others who have tried?

A long view of the ups and downs of renewable energy industry and earlier recycling efforts e.g. rushing unproven concepts into production resulted in shoddy products and installations. Green washing and over promising on claims and lack of watch dogging on earlier claims of recycled content and recyclability should not be repeated and should be severely squelched and publicly shamed when they occur. While I don’t want to stifle innovation, and it needs a free hand to flourish without constant threats of lawsuits and constant undercapitalization, I recognize the need to provide oversight so we don’t’ repeat our overselling of ‘green’ claims as was done in the early 1990s. The technological aspects of solutions to waste problems, recovering of plastics, are generally far ahead of our political and social ability to accept them.

I stop short of saying we have to ban certain materials from production but need strong incentives to steer manufacturers away from the things we have scientifically recognized cause serious environmental harm e.g. the unrestricted use of the vinyl chlorides and phthalate softeners and towards use of less malignant, or perhaps I might even say more benign products. Tax the bads, not the goods.

Related articles posted by Blair Pollock:

• Re-Educating the Consumer about Recycling (posted April 30,2009)
• The State of Recycling Today –Reply to the First round of ACC prompts from Blair L. Pollock, Orange County NC Solid Waste Department (posted April 23, 2009)