Published: February 28, 2007 12:14 am         

Bottle bill cast adrift from current session

CHARLESTON — A long-proposed deposit bill on beverage containers is bottled up in this session with no chance of escape, and that translates into a lot of litter going unfetched along West Virginia’s roadsides this year.

How can the West Virginia-Citizen Action Group predict so much refuse left untouched along highways?

Out of frustration at seeing the failure of a proposed 10-cent deposit on containers, intended as an incentive to reverse littering, some Adopt-A-Highway volunteer groups are throwing in the towel and calling it quits, says Linda Frame, program director for WV-CAG.

“Quite frankly, they’re pretty ticked off,” Frame said Tuesday.

“And several of them are not going to do cleanups this year because they feel like they’re not getting support from government. I don’t have all the numbers, but it’s at least two dozen so far. That’s a lot of trash.”

WV-CAG focused its efforts on the House of Delegates since the Senate version was triple-referenced to committees, complicating its chances of moving in the upper chamber.

“We worked the House Judiciary Committee really hard and thought we had the votes, but leadership didn’t have the same votes as we did,” Frame said.

“We had five sponsors on the House. I thought we had some good momentum there, and I believe we did, but it was just not enough to get it on the agenda.”

Of the 1,000 groups that volunteer its services in the Adopt-A-Highway program, nearly half responded to WV-CAG’s survey and 80 percent supported the so-called bottle bill, she said.

“These folks were so excited to learn for the first time there was a bottle bill campaign in their state,” she said.

“They were hoping to see some momentum, greater momentum that we had, and they just said if we’re not getting help from our communities, from our legislators, then why should we go do this pickup for free. This really hasn’t been anything CAG has proposed. They just kind of came up with this idea on their own out of frustration.”

Frame recalled the lament of volunteers bagging refuse from roadsides.

“Some told me they’ll start at the beginning of their road, get to the end, and by the time they get to the end, somebody has already thrown trash at the beginning of the road,” she said.

“This (bottle bill) would have helped them a great deal.”

In its survey of such volunteers, WV-CAG said it learned that 72 percent reported that containers comprise at least 40 percent of the litter they retrieve. Opponents maintained the figure is closer to 9 percent, but couldn’t pinpoint the source of that, Frame said.

“There’s a huge difference in listening to the people who are making money on these containers versus the people that are picking them up out of the gutters and out of the rivers,” she said.

Greg Sayre, representing the Association of Independent Professional Recyclers and lead spokesman for a coalition that opposed the bill, said those familiar with the proposal were beginning to see it was nothing more than “a huge tax increase.”

“That it’s going to hurt retail sales,” he said.

“That West Virginia would be the only state with a sales tax on food to have a bottle bill which basically makes it a bigger food tax. And I don’t think the infrastructure is in place to really do what some citizens want us to do.”

Sayre acknowledged “a lot of well meaning people” support the proposal, “but they have to realize you’re really looking at several hundred millions of dollars to invest in this whole project.”

“Maybe that several hundred million dollars should be put some place else,” he added.

This marked the fifth year WV-CAG has campaigned for the deposit bill as a means of easing the litter problem.

Undaunted, Frame vowed to return in the 2008 session and, in the interim, accelerate its effort with new wrinkles in its campaign.

“We’re going to keep at it,” she said. “We’re coming back.

“We’ve learned from what happened in other states that it’s really a multiple-year effort.”