Maine State Legislature considers reforms to 45

Redemption centers to see a raise in container handling fees and relief from sorting

Redemption centers to see a raise in container handling fees and relief from sorting

The latest breaking updates, delivered straight to your email inbox.

Redemption centers to see a raise in container handling fees and relief from sorting

The Maine State Legislature is looking at ways to modernize and strengthen the state's 45-year-old bottle bill program, but environmentalists and the beverage industry have different fixes in mind.

When consumers buy a drink at a Maine store, they pay an extra 5-cents for the bottle or can as an incentive to recycle them.

When they do, they get the nickel back -- or 15-cents for wine and liquor bottles.

Roughly three-quarters of drink containers sold in Maine are recycled, according to the Maine Department of Environmental protection.

But it's a big burden on the redemption centers to manually sort them.

"We are overwhelmed with bags every day," Shandra Rubchinuk, Co-Owner of Jansel Redemption Center, in Winthrop, said in an interview on Monday.

She said 80% of her four employees' time is spent sorting 325 different brands.

"So, the same water bottle, exact same material, with a different label, has to go into a different sleeve. There's currently 12 water bottles that have to do into 12 different sleeves." Rubchinuk said.

She spoke to Maine's Total Coverage after testifying at a public hearing on Monday before the Environment and Natural Resources Committee as it considered competing and overlapping reform bills.

Both bills would alleviate the burden of sorting by brand, focusing instead on materials -- plastic, aluminum, or glass.

One bill, backed by the Natural Resources Council of Maine, would require beverage distributors to pick up recycled bottles more often than once every two weeks, the current standard.

Mike Barriault, President and General Manager, Central Distributors, a fourth generation family-owned business in Lewiston, opposes that proposal.

Barriault said in an interview after his testimony, "By increasing pickups, you will in essence have more trucks on the road driving up greenhouse gases."

Beverage distributors also oppose the idea of reinvesting unclaimed Maine bottle deposits, worth around $10 million of dollars a year, into the bottle bill system.

"Our group has long used those un-redeemed deposits to help offset our costs to operate the bottle bill, like trucks and drivers and fuel, which are all increasing," Barriault said. "So, our pickup costs for trucks and drivers and resources to pick up products at redemption centers and ultimately to recycle the products far outweigh the unclaimed that we received. To take that away would essentially be another raise to the handling fee for beverages."

To improve the precarious finances of redemption centers, the legislature has already approved, and Governor Jante Mills has signed, earlier this month, a bill to raise the handling fee redemption centers receive from 4-and-a-half cents per bottle or can to 6-cents starting this September.

"Then we can stay in business," Rubchinuk said, "When you process 125,000 containers a week it does make a little bit of difference."