Groups call for California bottle bill revamp
Two advocacy groups and a consulting firm they hired have prepared a 20-page report saying a “precipitous decline” in funding for California’s bottle bill has led to redemption rates falling from a peak of 85 percent to 66 percent in recent years. The bottle bill legislation has an 80 percent target rate.
The Changing Markets Foundation and National Stewardship Action Council (NSAC) commissioned the New York office of United Kingdom-based Eunomia Research & Consulting to assess the current status of the California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act (AB 2020), the state’s deposit and return bottle bill.
The resulting report, “Genie in a Bottle: Unlocking the full potential of California’s bottle bill,” examines the decline in the program’s redemption rate “and also looks at the opportunities to update California’s bottle bill to meet the desires of the overwhelming majority of Californians,” the two groups say. Polling conducted as part of the report found that 74 percent of the state’s residents “support doing more to reduce plastic pollution.”