It’s been three years since Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a bill gutting an important recycling law that had been in place for four decades. SF 2378 changed “the bottle bill” that another Republican governor, Robert Ray, signed in 1978, creating a 5 cent deposit on bottles and cans of soda, beer and wine sold in Iowa and requiring retailers selling those beverages to redeem the bottles and cans. Ray frequently called the bottle bill his favorite piece of legislation from his five terms as governor.
SF 2378 allows grocery stores and convenience stores to stop accepting cans and bottles for recycling, if they sell prepared food or if they are within 10 miles of a redemption center in a county with a population of greater than 30 thousand, or within 15 miles of a redemption center in counties with smaller populations. The bill also tripled the handling fee paid by beverage distributors to redemption centers from 1 cent per bottle/can to 3 cents.
Supporters of the changes said it was important “to modernize” the bottle bill, and relieve some retailers of the burden of accepting empty cans and bottles.
“We’re going to let the people that sell bottles and cans essentially off the hook for collecting cans,” then-Sen. Joe Bolkcom, an Iowa City Democrat who led the opposition to SF 2378 in the legislature, said when it was passed. “And when we do that we’re going to make it a lot harder for consumers to conveniently take their bottles and cans back.”
How the changes made by SF 2378 are being administered and some of its impacts must be assessed by the Legislative Fiscal Review Committee, and the committee is required to submit a report on its findings to the legislature, according to a provision of the bill. As the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club pointed out in a news release on Tuesday, the deadlines for the review and report are quickly approaching. SF 2378 says the review must be done before the start of the next legislative session on Monday, Jan. 12. The report must be submitted by Jan. 31.
No meeting of the Legislative Fiscal Review Committee is currently scheduled. In fact, the committee hasn’t met since September 2019. The last entry on its schedule reads, “The December 19, 2019 Fiscal Committee meeting has been postponed and will meet on a future date to be determined.”
“It’s time to schedule the meeting now so they can do a thorough review and not violate Iowa law,” Jess Mazour of the Sierra Club Iowa Chapter said in the group’s news release.
A survey of Sierra Club members in Iowa — people with a greater interest in recycling than most of the general public — found 60 percent redeem three-quarters or more of their cans and bottles, with 21 percent having to make a trip of 10 miles or more to redeem them. Sixty percent said it was “harder to redeem cans and bottles since the change” and 62 percent said a “redemption center or collection site has closed in their area.”
“We want to expand the Bottle Redemption Program and make it more accessible,” Mazour said. “We hope the Legislative Fiscal Review Committee will hold their meeting soon so we can get to work improving the popular and important program.”
A poll published by the Des Moines Register in 2018, the year before SF 2378 passed, found that 57 percent of Iowans surveyed favored either keeping the redemption system created by the bottle bill as is or expanding it.
The bottle bill was first introduced in 1977, and it immediately faced strong opposition by the beverage industry and grocers. After Gov. Ray threw his support behind the bill during the following year’s session, it passed both chambers of the Iowa Legislature with bipartisan majorities.
Opposition and calls for eliminating the bill’s redemption required from the beverage industry and grocers continued over the decades that followed, but it wasn’t until Republicans took control of both the Iowa House and Senate, and controlled the governor’s office, that any large-scale change became a possibility. In the years before SF 2378, Republican members in the state legislature introduced bills to entirely eliminate the bottle and can redemption requirements, but those bills failed to advance.
In 2024, Cleaner Iowa, a nonprofit that supports the redemption program and opposed SF 2378’s changes to the bottle bill, released the results of a survey it conducted of almost 2,000 grocery stores, convenience stores and other retail outlets that were covered by the original bottle bill. According to Cleaner Iowa, 91 percent of businesses surveyed no longer accepted bottle and can returns. The survey also found there were no redemption centers in 29 Iowa counties.
