LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – It’s no longer time to kick the can down the road. Instead, Michigan legislators have reintroduced bills in the House and Senate to include additional beverage containers like water, tea, and sports drinks to the existing bottle deposit program, titled the “Michigan Beverage Container Act” but commonly referred to as the “Bottle Bill.” Its purpose back in the ’70’s was to reduce roadside litter, clean up the environment, and conserve energy and natural resources.

Expanding the Bottle Bill has been tried before but this time the new legislation could reach the finish line with the help of Michigan Democrats who are looking to get more containers recycled.

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Senator Sean McCann (D-Kalamazoo) who sponsored the Senate version of the bill and thinks that the time has come to add more containers to the program says, “There is no good reason that some of our plastic, glass and aluminum water bottles, and other single-use containers are not returnable when we have a functioning system that consumers and retailers are familiar with. We must act to protect our future by expanding our beverage container recycling system to keep bottles and cans out of landfills now!”

The House also has a duplicate version of the bill, sponsored by Rep. Christine Morse (D-Texas Twp). She said about the bill, “By updating our current bottle return system and adding additional incentives, we can continue to solidify Michigan as one of the leaders in our nation when it comes to bottle returns. I look forward to working with Senator McCann and stakeholders to strengthen our return system and keep our environment clean.”

Right now, most soft drinks and beer, in addition to some other carbonated beverages, have a refundable 10-cent deposit. Under the new bills, the program would expand to include all non-carbonated beverages with the exception of milk containers. Consumers would be able to redeem the deposit at smaller retailers if the store carries the product, with universal redemption at large stores.

Michigan is only one of 10 states with a bottle deposit program according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Under the current Michigan bottle law, distributors charge a ten-cent deposit per returnable container when selling their products to retailers. The retailers pass the charge on to their customers and then refund it when the containers are returned. Retailers get refunded when distributors pick up the empties and then any unclaimed deposits remaining get split between retailers  (25%) and environmental cleanup (75%) through the Cleanup and Redevelopment Trust Fund which is overseen by the Michigan Dept. of Treasury.

In 2020, Michigan residents only brought back about 73% of their containers to be recycled, the lowest rate on record with michigan.gov going back to data collected beginning in 1990. Unclaimed deposits amounted to $108 million the same year because the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in months-long disruption in the bottle deposit service.

 Not all retailers are happy about the proposed expansion to the Bottle Bill and have in the past objected to the unsanitary process, the additional costs and manpower needed to run the program. Amy Drumm of the Michigan Retailers Association said in the past about an expansion, “In an ideal world, we would love the bottle deposit law to go away. We think it’s old, it’s inefficient, but we know that we need a recycling solution.”

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Back when the Bottle Bill was enacted in the ’70’s, conservationists and environmentalists in Michigan had been sick and tired of seeing pop cans, beer cans and glass bottles in waterways, trails and state parks, not to mention littering homeowners’ yards and land on the side of highways across the state.

The Michigan United Conservation Clubs (MUCC) was a leader in spearheading the grassroots efforts to get the Bottle Bill enacted by putting it on the ballot. The Bottle Bill referendum was approved by Michigan voters by a substantial margin (64-36%) and went into effect in December of 1978, becoming the nation’s first and most successful redemption and recycling program with a current redemption rate that is higher than the other nine states that also have deposit laws.

At the time the Bottle Bill was enacted, returnables in Michigan only accounted for less than 15% of consumer container purchases for beer in the state and less than 25% for soft drinks. Those numbers increased and so did the consumption of beverages in the country. According to Downtown News Magazine, we now consume 57 percent of our beverages in single-use plastic containers and most of these drinks are non-carbonated.

Amy Trotter, MUCC’s executive director told Downtown News Magazine, “For a while now, we have been saying we need to take the bubbles out of the Bottle Bill. As it stands now, the Bottle Bill mostly takes care of carbonated beverages, but most of the waste we see now is from water bottles. Michigan was the first in the nation to have a Bottle Bill, and this is largely due in part because MUCC led the charge with a petition to get it on the ballot. We put it before the voters. Now, we would like to see an expansion to the bill. And if we have to take it to the voters again with a ballot proposal, we are willing to go that route.”

Both bills have been referred to committee and await a hearing.