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Jason Largay is area sales manager for Northern Maine at Pepsi Beverages Company in Hampden. Jasper Walsh is general manager at Maine Distributors in Bangor.
The Maine Legislature currently is considering LD 2141, a bill that would take $4 million of unclaimed deposits away from local beverage distributors. The unclaimed deposits are the nickels from containers that our customers recycle through their municipal recycling system rather than the bottle bill, or that they discard. Local distributors have used the unclaimed deposits as an offset against bottle bill costs since the program began.
If passed, we believe LD 2141 would be a stunning and unjustified reversal by the Legislature, and a serious setback to maintaining a stable, predictable environment for Maine businesses.
Beverage distributors collect and recycle approximately 847 million containers each year. To do that, we pay $50 million annually in bottle bill handling fees to redemption centers. We also pay $20 million annually in pick-up and processing costs — sending trucks to more than 300 redemption centers across the state, hauling containers to a central location, bailing and shipping them to processors to make new containers.
The bottle bill doesn’t work unless we pay these costs. We’re proud that our recycling rate (roughly 75%) is one of the highest in the country. But spending $70 million every year is expensive.
Recognizing that, in 2003 the Legislature confirmed that local distributors could use the unclaimed deposits as an offset against bottle bill expenses, provided redemption centers could combine our containers when the customer drops them off. This significantly reduces their costs. The total unclaimed deposits (approximately $12 million) is small compared to $70 million in handling fees and pick-up costs, but this was a meaningful promise that we’ve relied upon to make the economics of the bottle bill work.
Three years ago, local distributors took that reform a big step further. When the bottle bill was passed, the law required each distributor to collect its own containers individually. That wasn’t a problem when it covered only beer and soda. But as wine, juice, water, and other beverages were added, the system became inefficient. Multiple fleets of trucks crisscrossed Maine every day picking up bags of empty containers.
We came to the Legislature with a proposal to simplify the way bottles are collected and sorted: create a stewardship organization to end the practice of sorting beverage containers by brand and, instead, sort them by material. This isn’t an easy lift, but we believe it’s the best way to make the system more efficient, and less expensive.
After months of negotiations with other stakeholders, the Legislature unanimously approved our idea. However, there were several conditions that distributors had to agree to. We must pay the Maine Department of Environmental Protection $600,000 annually for its costs to oversee the bottle bill. We must contribute $500,000 annually to fund technology improvements for redemption centers. We must set aside $500,000 annually for distributors who want to set up a refillable container program. We must pay for the bags that redemption centers use to collect containers.
In return, all parties to the negotiation agreed that the unclaimed deposits would continue to be invested into the system to be used as an offset against handling fees and pick-up costs — as we have done for more than four decades. This is a hallmark of most successful collection systems. It was the single most important issue for local distributors.
Understandably, we’re surprised and disappointed that two years later, there are some who want to default on that agreement. LD 2141 proposes to redirect unclaimed deposits towards lake restoration and farmland access. Those are worthy purposes, but the Legislature should not be harming Maine businesses by raiding the unclaimed deposits to fund them.
Our local businesses employ thousands of Maine people. We support the bottle bill reform and are committed to making it work. We hope a majority of the Legislature feels the same way, and won’t break the promise they made to us.