Joseph Phelps saw a problem, and proposed a solution. The parks of Chicago are filled with broken glass, he told his colleagues on the Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners, to which Eugene Sawyer had just appointed him. Let’s pass a resolution favoring a deposit on all bottles sold in Chicago, so that people will return bottles to the store instead of littering and breaking them.
If Chicago’s bill passes, it would be a first for a major city. A bottle bill was defeated in Washington, D.C., in early 1987 after a bitter campaign in which beverage industry interests outspent bottle bill proponents by more than 15 to 1–a typical proportion. The Washington Post later reported that industry lobbyists spent $55 per vote to defeat the bill.
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“The Park District of Chicago has approximately 875 reported lacerations as a result of broken glass each year. . . . But only a small fraction of patrons who are injured bother to go to the field house and report it. Most go straight home, or to their car, not all the way across the park to the field house to fill out a report.”
“We have a complicated litter problem throughout the city,” says Erma Tranter, executive director of Friends of the Parks. She testified in favor of the proposal at the November 28 hearing, but urged the committee to put off a vote until Friends of the Parks could research the effects of bottle bills in other states. That research is now done. “Plastic and glass and cans littering the parks and streets and alleys begets more litter,” says Tranter. “You know, if it looks clean people don’t drop things there; if it looks dirty what’s the difference if I drop this Kleenex out?”
Vite also claims that retailers suffer under bottle bills. “It places an undue burden on the retailing community. It forces retailers to be the garbage collectors for the city of Chicago. It forces the retailer to allocate valuable selling space to have bottles returned, to have cans returned, in his or her facility. It requires a significant cash outlay on the part of the retailer to fund the initial purchase of bottles.”
David Vite claims that consumers would make a twofold response to bottle deposits: Chicagoans would travel to the deposit-free suburbs to buy their beer and soft drinks; and those who shop in the city would buy more aluminum cans, which are not covered by the proposed ordinance. “So the solid waste problem isn’t covered at all,” he says.
“A voluntary recycling program hasn’t worked,” replies Erma Tranter. Voluntary programs, she says, don’t give companies enough economic incentive to recycle products like plastic soft-drink bottles, since–with no financial incentive for consumers to return containers–they have no steady stream of used containers to rely on. Indeed, the only plastics-recycling programs of any significance rely on the plastic containers returned in the states with deposit laws. “I think it would probably stimulate interest in figuring out what could be done with them,” Tranter says of the plastic containers in Chicago.
