Legislators gave preliminary approval to two bills on Tuesday that would help make good on the state’s goal to recycle 28 percent of its waste by 2021.

The Zero Waste and Recycling Interim Study Committee advanced Bill 1, which would establish a center within the Colorado School of Mines to assist businesses that process recyclable materials and make them into new products. That assistance would include market analysis, identifying financial incentives, and advocating for pro-recycling policies at the state and local level.

Bill 1 would also require the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to study how to implement a program that would provide small refunds for glass bottles, and also to assess whether retailers and manufacturers should be required to accept their own products and packaging for recycling.

“Our state’s low recycling rate means we rely heavily on landfills, which can harm our environment and will leave a lasting impact on the natural beauty that in many ways defines our state,” said Rep. Meg Froelich, D-Englewood, a member of the committee.

Colorado recycles 17.2 percent of its waste, substantially lower than the national average of 35 percent. In April, Rep. Lisa Cutter, D-Evergreen, requested the formation of the study committee, which she now chairs.

Eco-Cycle, a Boulder-based nonprofit recycler, estimates that 95 percent of Coloradans’ waste is recyclable or compostable. Loveland leads the state in residential recycling, at a diversion rate of 61 percent. Boulder is second at 52 percent, while Denver is significantly lower at 22 percent.

The other piece of legislation, Bill 3, would give the CDPHE until September 2022 to devise a plan for encouraging composting, taking into account the climate change impacts of any needed infrastructure. Only Rep. Rod Pelton, R-Cheyenne Wells, voted no.

Bill 1 received more attention from the study committee, as well as more division: members advanced it on a vote of 6-4, with Republicans Pelton, Rep. Marc Catlin, and Sen. Don Coram voting no, along with Democratic Sen. Dominick Moreno.

Moreno was opposed to the personal property tax rebates that recyclers could receive for their operations, while asking for “at least some objective analysis of the reasons for those tax incentives.”

The bill would require $1.7 million in expenditures for fiscal year 2021-22, the largest component being $1 million set aside for the property tax reimbursements.

Committee members engaged at length with Bree Dietly, a principal with Massachusetts-based Northbridge Environmental. Her firm represents the American Beverage Association.

“We really are more fans of the economic incentive, making recycling cheap, free, and available,” she said. For example, charging residents more for bigger trash cans-putting a higher price on bigger waste loads-would nudge people toward recycling.

She described how Delaware repealed its law that provided for five-cent refunds for plastic and glass bottles-the only state to repeal a “bottle bill.” Instead, it instituted a four-cent fee on beverage containers and used the money generated to institute single-stream recycling for all single-family homes and for businesses.

The Universal Recycling Law took effect in 2011 and diversion rates rose from 33 percent in 2009 to 45 percent in 2016.

“We have roughly 22,000 municipalities in this country who make their own independent decisions about how to recycle. There are not 22,000 recycling experts in this country to staff those 22,000 municipal programs,” she said in advocating for state-level recycling solutions, including those coordinated by the waste producers themselves.

“Do plastic bans work?” Sen. Kevin Priola, R-Aurora, asked Dietly.

“‘No ban without a plan’ has always been our mantra,” she responded. Non-alcoholic beverage bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, are 7 percent of all plastics. All other assorted bottles and jugs comprise 14 percent of plastics. Dietly said there is a “massive amount of plastic material that is not recyclable.”

As for the PET, “we want that back, and that PET can make a lot of trips around the sun.”

Priola, the only Republican to support the bill, commented that “the mindset that we can start aggregating among the population is to reuse first and then go forward with virgin material second, as opposed to what we…did learn from our grandparents: ‘Go virgin first, we can afford this lifestyle.’ “

Two other bills were scuttled before the committee meeting. One was a “bottle bill” allowing for people to turn in beverage containers to receive refunds, an initiative that currently exists in 10 states. The other bill would have required CDPHE to run a recycling awareness campaign.

Moreno said elements of the education campaign were incorporated into Bill 1, while the bottle redemption bill “needs some further work.”