California’s bottle bill turned 40 on September 29. I’m proud of the role I played in making it happen, bringing together the unlikely coalition that made it possible.
Already a veteran of roughly ten years of losses to an industry alliance that had mastered the science of defeating deposit laws, I was pretty sure the traditional approach of waging an even bigger war against industry wouldn’t work for us. So before we launched a new campaign in 1986, I did something unusual.
I spoke with our opponents. Sat down with them in any office I could get myself into. And asked a pretty simple question: How can we make you want to beat us less?
When I showed up at Bill Coors’ office in Golden, Colorado, he led me to a back room, opened a file drawer, and pulled out a folder marked “Closed Loop System.” It was a model for a bottle bill that would cost much less than the traditional approach by replacing some command-and-control mandates with market-based mechanisms. The most significant would spare retailers from having to take back every container directly. Instead, a network of independent recycling centers could emerge to provide that service.
Chuck Collings, the president of Raley’s Supermarkets, turned out to be my next hero. A conservative, he was precisely the kind of executive my allies would think least likely to help us. But when I spoke with him, he told me he was ashamed of his own side. He thought they had been untruthful in their last campaigns against us. Retailers were eager to avoid another public battle. They valued their reputations. Being opposed to a sensible environmental law was not something they looked forward to. He told me: “If you solve my problem, I’ll solve yours. I’ll get the rest of the grocers aboard.”
He kept his promise. The brewers joined the retailers, and soon the soft-drink bottlers and the unions that served them all.
We had a deal. Republican and Democratic lawmakers voted for the measure, authored by Democratic Assemblyman Burt Margolin. Republican Governor George Deukmejian signed it into law.
Since then, Californians have recycled more than half a trillion bottles and cans—nearly 550 billion, according to CalRecycle. All that astonishes me. I’m grateful beyond measure.
Three things made the deal possible. We asked before we designed. We found the one cost our opponents most wanted to avoid, managing the logistics of redemption, and we removed it. And we learned who could bring the rest along. It was the grocers, not the bottlers.
The law worked because the water flowed downhill. The incentives made sense for everyone.
California needs that method again. Environmental organizations have challenged the regulations implementing SB 54, the state’s packaging law, arguing they weaken it. Industry groups are pursuing delay, amendment, repeal or litigation. The state’s producer responsibility organization, Circular Action Alliance (CAA), sends its final plan to CalRecycle this month.
SB 54 also asks for what we never delivered in 1986, and that I am still eager to accomplish. When I first set out to pass the bottle bill, refillable containers still had a substantial presence in the marketplace. By the time we passed it, they had largely disappeared. The beverage industry consolidated around linear systems that reward scale: produce centrally, ship long distances, sell, discard. So we have a system that recycles, but does not refill.
By January 1, 2027, CAA must cut the plastic packaging and food serviceware its members sell in California by 10 percent. At least a fifth of that cut has to come from shifting to reusable or refillable packaging.
This matters beyond packaging. Many circular activities reward proximity: repair, maintain, refill, restore, resell, collect, compost and remanufacture. They are the key to a future economy that complements global institutions with abundant local enterprises. We can be global where scale creates value and local where proximity creates value.
Nobody has yet found the design that makes source reduction pay, yet source reduction is where we get the biggest environmental benefits. I don’t have the answer. In 1986, I didn’t either, until I asked. So here are the two questions I would ask now.
To producers: What is the one cost you most want to avoid? Under SB 54 you pay fees on the packaging you sell, and the law’s fee system is intended to recognize source-reduction performance. Could those fees be built around the cost you fear most, so that every pound of material you eliminate reduces your future compliance cost? This is the test: a packaging engineer should be able to walk into the CFO’s office and say, give me the money to redesign this product.
To retailers: Would you play the role the grocers played in 1986? They brought the brewers along. Today you can use supplier scorecards, purchasing commitments, shelf preference and shared standards to make lower-material designs commercially valuable. That matters most for refill, because a new system needs early volume before its infrastructure becomes economical.
Forty years ago, we made progress by asking our opponents what would make it easier for them to do what was right. Nobody has yet asked that question about source reduction under SB 54.
It is time once again for the parties at each other’s throats—battling to reduce SB 54’s costs or raise its environmental benefits—to sit down at a table and work out how to do both.
We’ve done it before.
We can do it again.
Let’s start now.
