Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 10, 1991 TAG: 9102080328
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Elizabeth Obenshain
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Madison Marye, a tough old farmer from Montgomery County, has fought the fight for a decade, and has been knocked down every year in the General Assembly because he wouldn't quit introducing his bottle-recycling bill.
This year was it, he announced last month - his last battle over the bottles. In a decade, his bill had never even won a committee vote.
To his amazement, this year his bottle bill survived not one but two committees. Then it was clobbered on the Senate floor with the help of a combined knockout punch from lobbyists for beer and soft-drink distributors, brewers and grocers.
Maybe average folks should have had a lobbyist down there throwing punches, too. My guess is many voters would have liked to have swung a few good punches in support of the senator's bill.
Even curmudgeons who won't recycle to protect the environment are being scared into recycling by news about $9 milion trash trains and million-dollar county landfills.
Unless you have a graduate degree in political bedfellows, it's hard to understand why a proposal as common-sense as recycling pop bottles and beer cans is a Mission Impossible in the General Assembly.
For a political veteran like Marye, the answer is obvious: "It's awfully hard to vote against a fellow who's made a nice contribution to your campaign. Special-interest groups are hard to oppose and that's whom I've been opposing."
Not that I criticize distributors and retailers for winning the bottle battle. Not many of us volunteer for more work and bother, even if it is for a worthwhile cause. Grocers don't want the headaches of storing the returned bottles and cans.
One New River Valley supermarket executive even had the nerve to question what the newspaper would do if every paper we sold was returned to our office. In other words . . . if your editorial writers like recycling so much, why don't you recycle all the newspapers you print?
Well, . . . probably we should, and probably we'll have to someday.
The paper did make a start this past year . . . buying shredders for farmers so we could give away newspapers to recycle as bedding for animals. Now bored cows can chew their cuds and read my column at the same time. I'm not sure what that does to milk production, but at least it keeps those papers out of landfills.
Keeping bottles out of landfills and off the roadsides sounded like a good idea to Marye when the bill was first introduced in the '70s. "If you just think what would have happened if it had been enacted 15 years ago . . . the savings in landfill space, the savings in energy, the savings in expense to local government. It would have been a fantastic accomplishment."
Marye is philosophical about his bill's 10th defeat, partly because he feels in his bones that a bottle bill will pass eventually.
He predicts that, as landfill costs rise, taxpayers will join environmentalists in making the bottle bill a campaign issue.
If and when it passes, the bottle bill won't have Marye's name on it.
But my guess is that he'll be sitting back in his chair in the Senate chamber with a smile on his face like a proud grandpa.
AUTHOR NOTE: Elizabeth Obenshain is the Roanoke Times & World-News' New River editor.
Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY
by CNB