In an op/ed piece for the Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Public Interest Research Group’s Emily Scarr voices support for a bottle/can deposit, one item raised as part of Governor O’Malley’s recently announced plan to respond to climate change.
From her opinion piece:
Governor O’Malley has rightly included container recycling in his new plan, in the form of a deposit on recyclable beverage containers, commonly referred to as a bottle bill. The plan would get our state to an achievable goal of 80 percent container recycling by 2020.
The 10 states with bottle bills have container recycling rates triple ours and have all seen major reductions in litter. A 2011 impact analysis by the University of Maryland’s Environmental Finance Center asserts that “beverage container deposit programs have proven to be the most effective tool for reducing litter.”
Read Conduit Street coverage of the Governor’s plan unveiling.