What Every Person in Connecticut Needs to Know
In college, Julie Cammarata promised herself she’d make a difference in the world. The Connecticut native graduated from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte before returning home for an internship with the Office of the Judge Advocate General at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.
Next, Cammarata landed a job as an aide in the governor’s office. She worked full-time while attending law school at the University of Connecticut.
“It was hell,” she says. “Without my coworkers at the governor’s office, I wouldn’t have finished. They wouldn’t let me quit.”
The owner and principal lobbyist of Cammarata Government Affairs had been a philosophy major at UNC. “I studied ethics. Why life matters.”
“I can’t go to work every day and do something I don’t believe in. I like puzzles. And this is a puzzle with tremendous consequences.”
Cammarata is talking about recycling and Connecticut’s Bottle Bill, which hasn’t been updated since 1978. Now, the state finds itself deeply embroiled in a trash crisis.
″[America was] sending 4,000 of the biggest shipping containers a day to China,” Cammarata said. “Around 2013 or 2014, the Chinese government passed a law called The Green Sword.” By 2017, China would no longer import materials with a 1% contamination rate. “That was China’s way of saying, ‘We’re not taking your trash anymore. Our people and our country deserve better than that.’”
Most recyclables are not getting recycled at all. “A lot is getting burned in landfills in the United States. Some is going to Thailand,” Cammarata says. “But one by one, countries are starting to say no.”
The Arc Eastern Connecticut operates a redemption center in Woodstock, recycling 1.6 million pieces of trash annually. People with intellectual and developmental disabilities learn valuable job skills there while earning minimum wage. But the current 5 cent redemption rate no longer covers processing costs. Unless the Bottle Bill is updated, The Arc will have to shut its redemption center, eliminating jobs and training.
With a 10 cent redemption fee, Connecticut would join Michigan and Oregon in taking the lead. Michigan now claims the greatest redemption rates in the nation. It’s time!
Kathleen Stauffer is chief executive officer of The Arc Eastern Connecticut. For information on The Arc, go to www.TheArcECT.org. For more articles by this author visit www.kathleenstauffer.com
