Keep Connecticut’s Bottle Deposit
Editorial Hartford Courant May 17, 2017
A bill that would eliminate the refundable 5-cent deposit on bottles and replace it with a 4-cent per bottle tax is bad policy that will hurt the environment, the consumer and the state of Connecticut.
The main argument in favor of Senate Bill 996 is convenience. With the ease of single-stream recycling in so many communities, why not just toss the bottle in the blue bin and skip the nickel?
There are many good reasons why not. But the most surprising might be this: Single-stream recycling, while convenient, is imperfect. It does not completely separate the different sorts of containers for recycling. The glass and plastic and other materials are “contaminated” by each other, in industry lingo, and the slightly mixed trash is far less useful as recyclable material than containers that come through the deposit system, already separated into plastic, glass and aluminum.
