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While the Trump administration has paused many proposed new tariffs, some governments, such as the 25% tariff on aluminum, are still in play. Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said Coca-Cola could increase its use of plastic to alleviate price increases as it imports aluminum from Canada for soda cans.
Regardless of your tariff stance on President Trump, people who care about reducing pollution and saving money should agree that beverage companies can use it as an opportunity to reduce waste and buy recycled aluminum, which is collected by local recycling programs. Non-Americans do not.
Congress should adopt a national bottle bill instead of sitting while big companies sell more plastic bottles.
For more than 40 years, residents of 10 states have gained benefits from the national level refundable container deposit laws, known as “bottle bills”. It works: I go to the store to buy a can of soda or a bottle of beer, and I pay for a deposit of nickel or dimes, which will be returned to me when I return the empty container to the store or a local small business (called a redemption center). A dime is better because you see a higher rate of return.
This simple and elegant backhaul system keeps billions of beverage containers from ending in the environment, whether made of aluminum, glass or plastic. The recovery rate of beverage containers with sediments is 56% to 75%, while the recovery rate of containers without sediments is much lower: 18% to 37%. Research shows that these bills are very effective in reducing pollution.
New York passed its own bottle deposit law in 1982 and reduced trash by 70%. Next time you visit New York, see if you notice beer bottles or soda cans littering the streets. You won’t. That’s because many residents pick up bottles and jars to collect nickel deposits. The United States can get the benefits of a national bottle bill while creating new jobs and retaining natural resources.
The icing on the cake on the cake is that using reverse vending machines is innovative and looks like a soda machine, but you can keep them clean and separate empty containers, thus having a much higher recycling rate than containers placed in your own home recycling bin. Some supermarkets use another method that allows consumers to place glass, plastic and metal beverage containers in the same pack, paste their own QR code stickers, and then place them in the store to save a lot of time. Refundable nickel and dimes can be collected through cash, donations to nonprofits, transferred to university savings plans or storage credit.
From Norway to Ecuador to the Netherlands, dozens of countries have implemented redeemable deposit laws for beverages. The only reason we don’t have a national bottle bill in the United States is the political influence of beverage giants like Coca-Cola and Pepsi and supermarket halls. Coca-Cola and Pepsi will get free travel when it comes to recycling and pollution cleaning costs. They prefer to make taxpayers pay huge amounts of garbage cleaning, recycling and disposal.
Reuse is better than recycling. The United States also lags behind much of the world when using reusable beverage bottles, which could be a key part of the law of returning containers. Countries such as Ethiopia, the Philippines, Germany and Nicaragua are leading innovations in reuse, providing great examples of how to effectively use reusable bottles. In the Philippines, Oceania reports that 40% of all packaged non-alcoholic beverages sold are reusable bottles. The empty glass bottles were returned, cleaned, sterilized and used dozens of times.
American beverage companies failed to meet their large public commitments and could be transferred to reusable packaging. Coca-Cola abandoned its goal of increasing reusable bottles to 25% of its sales in December. Likewise, Pepsi failed to meet its goal of designing its 100% packaging to be recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or reusable by 2025. These types of companies promises are often to generate headlines and place the public – then abandoned by those same companies, then abandoned by those companies, and forgotten by those same companies.
As if the scourge of plastic pollution is not enough, the tariffs are more of the reasons why Coca-Cola, Pepsi and others move to reusable glass bottles. Unlike manufacturing facilities that have been waiting for decades, Coca-Cola and Pepsi can build commercial bottles and hand-washing operations in a fairly short time. Europe leads the United States – These commercial bottle handwashing actions not only keep containers away from landfills and incinerators, but also create local jobs.
As tariffs increase the cost of aluminum and other materials used to make beverage containers, Congress can assume these special interests and adopt state bottle bills. Now is the time to act.
Judith Enck is a former EPA district administrator, president of Beyond Plastics, and professor at Bennington College.