Testimony in support of SB 728 to create a bottle deposit for Texas

Testimony by Environment Texas’ Luke Metzger before the Senate Natural Resources committee on April 15 in support of SB 728 (Johnson) to create a bottle deposit program for Texas.

Good morning again Chairman and Members. I’m Luke Metzger Executive Director of the Environment Texas for the bill. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Texas has the trashiest beaches in America, and our organization has done clean-ups of beaches and rivers and seen that, and bottles are a big component of the trash. And doing those clean-ups are frustrating because you clean it up and then you come back again, and it’s just as trashy as it was before.

We need institutional models to help prevent that trash from going on our beaches in the first place, and this bill will help us do that. Bottle bills end up having a recycling rate of beverage containers of 70%, compared to about 30% in states that don’t have bottle bills. And that means that we get 40% less litter, and it saves cities money on waste management by diverting waste from landfills. In America we throw away 197 billion beverage containers every year. That’s a huge waste, and has a resource value of $3.8 billion. The energy required to replace those wasted containers is enough to power 3.4 million homes. It’s also very polluting to then have to produce those new containers rather than recycle them. So, we think that this is a great bill and we support it. Thank you.