Buy a wine bottle, pay a deposit?
DEC commissioned study of pros and cons of expanding bottle bill
The state Department of Environmental Conservation has quietly commissioned a study of the ins and outs of expanding New York ’s bottle bill to include wine and liquor bottles.
While making no recommendations, the study, completed in November by the Rochester
Institute of Technolog y ’s Pollution Prevention Institute, and recently obtained by the Times Union, lays out the potential costs and benefits of such an expansion, which has for years been sought by environmentalists but opposed by those in the wine and spirits industry.
The study concludes that adding a nickel deposit on liquor and wine bottles could help divert them from municipal waste streams, where they cause difficulties. And it would increase recycling rates of wine and liquor
bottles by an estimated 65 percent.
But the sur vey also notes that a deposit would impose costs on liquor and wine sellers, including the expense of buying or renting “reverse vending ” machines like those in supermarkets, and costs for labor, which could total $36 million annually.
If the bill were extended to wine and liquor bottles, New York would be the fourth state nationally to include those products in a deposit system, joining Iowa, Maine and Vermont. But there are differences, especially with New York ’s system in which supermarkets can’t sell wine or spirits.
Because only licensed wine and liquor stores can sell such products in New York, they are not set up for deposits and would likely have to buy or rent the machines to accept empty bottles — or designate staff to handle that task.
If adopted, New York would likely be the state with the largest volume of bottles due to its size. Researchers found that nearly 488 million wine or liquor bottles were sold in 2015 in New York. There are about 4,500 wine and liquor stores in the state and 164 processing facilities that could handle recycled bottles, a process that calls for crushing them in to granules known as cullet.
Glass bottles have long posed a challenge for municipal and private recycling systems since so many in the state are single-stream, meaning consumers put all their recyclable items, including glass, in the same bins and trucks, making it difficult for recyclers to separate those items out. That difficulty leads to high contamination rates, meaning that materials like steel or aluminum may have unacceptably high levels of glass fragments. Those worries have heightened this year as China, a major global customer of recyclable material, has greatly tightened its contamination standards, as the study notes.
Environmentalists are hoping a bottle bill expansion passes during this coming legislative session.
“We are calling on the Legislature to expand the program to cover all glass beverage containers including wine, liquor, cider, and other nonalcoholic bottles,” Julie Tighe, president of the NY League of Conservation Voters, said in testimony at a legislative hearing on recycling earlier this fall.
“I think this report makes the case for expansion,” added Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator in the Obama administration who now teaches at Bennington College.
The report cost approximately $27,000, according to DEC, and it marks the first time the agency has collaborated on such a study.
Environmentalists also note that the state Senate is now under a Democratic majority. Senate Republicans in the past have been cool toward expansions of the bottle bill.
Those in the spirit and wine business say an expansion would pose big logistical problems as well as costs.
“We have a bunch of people who don’t know what the hell they are doing,” Craig Allen, owner of All Star Wine and Spirits in Latham, said of the policymakers looking at an expansion. Unlike supermarkets, Allen said, many wine and spirit stores are small, with just a few employees. Ser ving customers during a busy time and accepting empties could quickly become an issue. And many simply lack the space to store used bottles or to have a reverse vending machine, he said.
As for whether the DEC study indicates a new push for an expansion by the state, that ’s hard to say given how long this debate has been going on.
The original bottle bill dates to 1982, and efforts to expand the list of bottles with deposit have been around for more than a decade.