Water bottle drinkers will have to pay an extra 5 cents in New York starting this Saturday, October 31. The nickel fee is just a bottle deposit, so if those who have the bad habit of drinking bottled water want it back, they'll have to recycle the plastic water bottle by returning it to a store. The new deposit applies to all containers of water under a gallon and works like the soda and beer bottle deposits that have been in place for years.
This sounds like a great idea to us. While a 5-cent bottle deposit might not make anyone switch from bottled to tap, at least, in theory, more bottles will get recycled. Right now, on average, only 20% of water bottles get recycled, so any improvement would be a good improvement.
This bottle bill has gotten a slow start. It was originally supposed to go into effect back in June. But, surprise, surprise, the International Bottled Water Association filled a lawsuit calling it unconstitutional because water bottlers wouldn't have enough to time to make packaging changes to accommodate the new deposit in time. So the bill was temporarily stopped, until now. Almost. While the law is effective on Oct. 31, New York officials are giving retailers a grace period until Nov. 8 to comply with the new rule.
Image by Rex Roof on flickr under a Creative Commons License.
This sounds like a great idea to us. While a 5-cent bottle deposit might not make anyone switch from bottled to tap, at least, in theory, more bottles will get recycled. Right now, on average, only 20% of water bottles get recycled, so any improvement would be a good improvement.
This bottle bill has gotten a slow start. It was originally supposed to go into effect back in June. But, surprise, surprise, the International Bottled Water Association filled a lawsuit calling it unconstitutional because water bottlers wouldn't have enough to time to make packaging changes to accommodate the new deposit in time. So the bill was temporarily stopped, until now. Almost. While the law is effective on Oct. 31, New York officials are giving retailers a grace period until Nov. 8 to comply with the new rule.
Image by Rex Roof on flickr under a Creative Commons License.
FYI: the NY State bill contained unconstitutional language about a NY State-specific UPC bar code and we successfully challenged that erroneous concept in Federal Court and surprise, surprise, the judges ruled in our favor. Products can't have two bar codes! They don't call them Universal Product Codes for nothing! The bottled water industry has nothing against tap water and you'd be wise to be encourage more recycling of all plastic containers. Good news! New data from NAPCOR shows recycling in 2008 jumped almost 10% over 2007. 27% of all PET plastic containers are now recycled. Let's all keep up the good work.