Lt. Gov. wants bottle bill expanded

By Whitney Woodward | Tuesday, March 18, 2008

DES MOINES — With a legislative proposal to expand the state’s bottle deposit program in limbo, Lt. Gov. Patty Judge summoned a landfill director and redemption center owner to the Capitol Tuesday to push the plan.

The Culver administration is pushing lawmakers to add juice, water, sports drink and tea bottles and cans to the state’s nickel-per-container redemption program. Judge said more containers would be recycled annually.

The program, created 30 years ago, now includes alcoholic and carbonated drink containers.

“At that time, Iowa was seen as a champion of the environment,” Judge said about the program’s beginnings. “Very few states had taken such a bold step to keep containers out of their ditches and out of their parkways. ... It’s time for Iowa to once more be a champion of the environment, by expanding the bottle bill.”

Sara Bixby, director of the South Central Iowa Solid Waste Agency, estimated that more than 2,000 tons of plastic containers that could be recycled are thrown away in her landfill each year. Expanding the bottle bill wouldn’t help her business, but it would protect the environment, she said.

The plan also would double the rate bottle redemption centers are paid for handling the containers, from one penny to two.

“The redemption centers have done a great job for

30 years,” Judge said. “Unfortunately, they have never had a raise.”

Adjusting that rate will help redemption centers, whose owners have repeatedly called for an increase to stay afloat.

David Jones, who owns the MCF Can Redemption Center in Atlantic, said Iowa’s centers earn less than 80 percent of other bottle bill states. The penny per container fee has never been increased to account for inflation, and some centers have blamed the static fee as the reason they’ve gone out of

business.

Whitney Woodward can be contacted at (515) 243-0138 or whitney.woodward@lee.net. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.