opinion

Why it still matters, 40 years later, how a child helped Ray push for Iowa's bottle bill

Regardless of political affiliation, as a society, we often frame our public policy decisions as being beneficial “for future generations.” That’s how we discuss education funding, health care, Social Security … the list goes on and on If you live long enough, you get to find out if some of those decisions actually pan out for the young people who come along after you.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait that long to reap the benefits of Iowa’s bottle deposit law, commonly known as the “bottle bill”. And I believe it happened, at least in part, because in the mid-1970s, a child looked Gov. Bob Ray in the eye and told him exactly what his generation needed. I know, because I was lucky enough to be in the room when it happened.

But first, a little context. After years of indifference, in the 1970s people started realizing that our environment was in real trouble, and it was hurting our health. In many places air quality was terrible, water pollution was rampant, and people threw trash out of their car windows as a matter of routine. That was the era when Congress passed the Clean Water Act, put teeth into the Clean Air Act, and enacted the Endangered Species Act. It wasn’t a partisan thing, either; President Richard Nixon signed all of them. The ’70s is also the decade that gave us Earth Day and Arbor Day.

Following that trend, in 1971 Oregon became the first state to enact a bottle deposit law.

In the summer of 1977, across Iowa, groups of 13- to 18-year-olds served as members of the Youth Conservation Corps (YCC), a federally funded organization that cultivated a spirit of civic service in teenagers while giving them real work experience. Their uniforms included hard hats, because they were earning their paychecks by building, shoveling, and working near heavy machinery. Quite often, picking up litter was on their collective “to-do” list. At that time, I was head of the Webster County YCC in Fort Dodge. And although it was a federal program, Iowa’s YCC chapters were overseen by the governor’s office.

That summer, dozens of YCC kids and assorted leaders from across the state were crammed into Ray’s office to give him an annual update and get our pictures taken with him. It was the sort of thing that would normally take about 15 or 20 minutes. But this time was different. One of the younger kids raised his hand, and said he wanted to talk to the governor about something. He was from an eastern Iowa chapter, and he’d noticed that they seemed to be picking up a lot of empty bottles and cans littering public places. So he started tracking it. There was a clear trend, and he had the paperwork right there to prove it (all hand-tallied, because this was long before the advent of Excel spreadsheets).

Best of all, the kid said he knew exactly how to fix it. Iowa needed a bottle bill.

Ray’s face suddenly changed, and he immediately started asking questions. This was no longer a mere ceremonial visit. The governor was interested, engaged, and wanted to learn more. There had been some chatter about an Iowa bottle bill earlier, as part of Ray’s Iowa 2000 initiative — a series of meetings statewide in which leading Iowans and community members hashed out how the state should look in the year 2000.

But this wasn’t an adult saying we needed to do something “for future generations." This was a kid looking into the governor’s eyes and telling him, “This is what my generation needs right now”.

Ray signed the bottle bill into law on May 12, 1978. It went into effect the following spring. In 1979 I was leading a Conservation Corps program for young adults which did work similar to YCC. Within 18 months, we weren’t just picking up fewer cans and bottles thanks to the new deposit; we were picking up less litter in general. After all, if you’re taking your empty pop can home to redeem, why wouldn’t you just throw away your fast food wrappers there, too?

For decades, Ray’s groundbreaking initiative held up beautifully. It’s still incredibly popular, and the most effective recycling program in Iowa’s history. But a lot can change in 40 years. Today, we’re facing a new crisis as plastic water bottles flood the waste stream and litter our parks, roads, and waterways. And Iowa’s bottle bill is showing some cracks. In the 1970s, plastic bottles were mostly 2-liter pop containers. Today, with the rising popularity of bottled water, sports drinks, coffee, and tea, 40% of beverage containers don’t have a deposit. And the recycling companies that empty our curbside bins can’t afford to pick up the slack without raising rates on taxpayers.

There are many proposals out there to handle this problem. I can’t speak to the economics of raising the deposit or the handling fee paid to redemption centers (one of my former Iowa State University colleagues, economist Dr. Dermot Hayes, has done so at length). But I can speak to my experiences — seeing how rapidly the bottle bill changed Iowa for the better 40 years ago, and watching a new wave of plastic bottles litter roads and pile up in public trash cans today. The simplest solution to address the plastic waste crisis is to strengthen our bottle bill, and we can start by expanding the deposit to most non-carbonated beverages.

The worst thing we could do? Repeal or phase out Iowa’s bottle bill, and 40 years of progress with it. That’s what Rep. Brian Lohse of Bondurant aims to do with House File 2205. His proposal would just take cans and bottles out of grocery stores and deposit them right back into our ditches and waterways. And unfortunately, there’s no longer a YCC to help mitigate the damage.

Please join me and ask your Iowa state senators and representatives to protect the bottle bill. Let’s use a proven, youth-driven solution to create a cleaner, greener Iowa for future generations.

Dr. Barbara Licklider is Iowa State University professor emerita in the educational leadership and policy studies program. She served as director of the Webster County Youth Conservation Corps from 1975-78, and directed the Big Creek Young Adult Conservation Corps from 1978-80.