Bottle bill is vital for Conn. environment
Should hearings have such large agendas — and what happened at the bottle bill hearing last week? Of course these are two very large subjects, but they came together at the bottle bill hearing last Friday.
First, look at what happens to people’s testimony when hearings have large numbers of agenda items. The people with the low numbers get to testify whether they have expertise on the subject or not — and those with higher numbers do get to testify, but do not really get heard. One example of this is a medical doctor from M. Sinai Hospital, with expert testimony, who waited from 10 a.m. until after midnight to testify, and when she did testify, who was there to hear her at 12:30 in the middle of the night after 14 hours of testimony?
How did all this affect the bottle bill expansion? What is the purpose of the bottle bill expansion anyway?
In many ways, the purpose of the bill got lost during the hearing, and later testimonies that might have brought the purpose back were heard too late in the evening to make a difference.
The purpose of this bill is twofold.
There’s the need to get the huge numbers of juice, iced tea and sports drink bottles out of the waste stream.
And because most of these bottles are plastic, we need to get as much plastic out of the waste stream as possible. We are in the middle of a plastic epidemic and plastic is negatively affecting both the environment and human health. Environment and Human Health Inc., or EHHI, has been working on the bottle bill and plastic issues for over five years, and therefore EHHI has a lot of expertise on these issues. After being given a high number to testify, our remarks came after 10 hours of prior testimony. By 8:30 p.m., when we got to testify, legislators were tired, as it was late after the dinner hour. So our testimony got three minutes and no questions were asked.
Some of the earlier testimonies, when the legislators were fresh, got a half-hour to talk. There were even cases when the legislators knew someone who was given a high number — they got bumped up into an earlier spot and some of them talked for well over a half-hour.
EHHI wanted to explain that liquor bottles should not be in this bill — these bottles are mainly glass and do not fit into the present redemption machines. Liquor bottles do not fit into the purpose of this bill.
As well, tiny plastic bottles called “nips” should not have been included in the bill. They do not fit into the already established redemption machines and they only add to confusion with the bill. There will be other ways, at a later date, to handle both glass bottles from liquor stores and “nips” — but not now, and not in this bill.
The bottle bill expansion is extremely important and needs to pass into law so that Connecticut can get these huge numbers of plastic bottles out of our waste stream. We cannot lose sight of why this bill is important.