After more than 30 years, it’s clear that Maine’s returnable beverage container law, or bottle bill, works. Our streams and highways are relatively free of discarded containers.

But, after three decades, it’s also worth sitting down and seeing if there is a better way to accomplish the same goal.

That’s why we favor LD 1255, a resolve that would bring stakeholders together to analyze the program and see if this is still the best way to serve the state’s needs.

That’s also why we oppose five other bills before the Legislature that seek to change various aspects of the law.

One bill would exempt containers larger than 28 ounces, the thinking being that these beverages are mainly consumed in the home and likely to be recycled anyway.

Another would allow for lawyer fees and court costs to be assessed against anyone knowingly seeking deposit money on containers purchased outside the state.

A third would reduce truck travel incurred by bottlers picking up discarded containers from recycling centers.

Another would change the way redemption centers are counted in a community and set a standard for the types of bags used to hold recycled containers.

The final bill would exempt small beverage distributors from the unclaimed deposit requirements.

All of the bills hint at various problems with the current law, namely that it is expensive and inefficient.

When the bottle bill was first adopted in 1976, the recycling of household waste was in its infancy.

The impetus for that first bill was less about cleaning up the state’s roadsides than about extending the life of municipal landfills.

Landfills were filling up, and plastic bottles and aluminum cans were gobbling up space.

The law has worked. Somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the beverage containers subject to the law are recycled each year, a far higher rate than normal household waste.

But that success comes at a cost of millions of dollars per year which is ultimately borne by distributors and consumers.

Beverage distributors pay fees to recycling centers and then pay to have their trucks collect the containers from the more than 800 recycling centers in the state.

In addition to higher costs, Maine consumers who want to retrieve their deposits must store and transport messy bottles and cans to recycling centers.

Could there be a better way? That’s what the beverage industry would like to explore with all stakeholders, including environmental groups, the Maine Municipal Association, waste management firms and redemption centers.

Advocates for the resolve say they are only looking for ways to improve the law but won’t support anything that will have a negative environmental impact.

We take them at their word.

This issue would be a lot easier if every community had an effective recycling strategy.

Some meet the gold standard, a pay-per-bag system combined with single-stream recycling, like Brunswick.

In those places, recycling rates are relatively high.

Other communities have bare-bones programs or require residents to take their recycling to transfer stations. There recycling rates are predictably lower.

Still, there is no harm in studying the current system to see if it still fits the state’s needs.

Bills to change the system now should be put on hold until those talks take place.

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