Like most people in this state, Colorado’s distillers support environmental responsibility and sustainability. We make our living providing high-quality products that people can enjoy at a reasonable price, in a way that promotes the sustainability and environmental stewardship our industry depends on. HB 1355, the “Producer Responsibility Program for Statewide Recycling Act” will make it harder for us to achieve those goals. Worse, it will significantly harm our industry.

We distillers applaud the authors’ intentions in drafting HB22-1355. However, the bill as currently structured is a wolf in green sheep’s clothing. It assumes that business will inevitably do bad things and will need to be punished. This punitive approach will harm industries, businesses and products that Coloradans love, rather than protect our environment.

Many Colorado distilleries have, or are pursuing, B-corporation certification, meaning they have demonstrated a high level of commitment to social and environmental responsibility. Over the years, we have dedicated tremendous efforts to diverting our leftover material and by-products away from waterways or landfills. For example, we work with local farms and ranches that use our liquid waste as organic fertilizer or animal feed. Reduce, reuse and recycle is an integral part of our industry’s cultural DNA.

It is not the official intent of this bill that we object to, but its structure. As designed, the bill, and the program it creates, would be disastrous to our industry.

HB 1355 forces businesses like ours  – producers of foods and beverages who simply wish to sell our products to fellow Coloradans – to join and pay a tax to a third-party organization, with barely any government oversight, for the ostensible purpose of subsidizing the recovery and disposal of recycling containers. This creates many problems.

First, it would create a significant administrative burden and pile additional layers of red tape on predominantly small businesses that already address mountains of red tape. Businesses, like ours, in the alcohol beverage market, are among the most highly regulated in Colorado. This program would require each of our businesses to maintain yet another set of books, and another level of bureaucracy – this one largely unaccountable to elected officials or to the public – which our business owners must manage at a time when we are just figuring out how to recover from the last two years.

Second, the bill imposes what amounts to an additional tax on consumer products, regardless of your definition of tax. This financial burden is being pressed on predominantly small locally-owned businesses. They are some of the highest taxed businesses in Colorado that were among the hardest hit during the pandemic. And these business are still struggling to recover from it in an economic environment marked by rising costs, labor shortages, supply-chain issues and myriad other challenges.

Third, the bill’s structure is punitive in nature, with a heavy focus on penalizing businesses deemed non-compliant by an unaccountable third party, without a framework for due process or any path for recourse allowed. Not only does this create an extremely antagonistic system within which small businesses are expected to operate, but it blatantly ignores all of the work and effort that our businesses, and others in the alcohol beverage industry, have done voluntarily to promote and enhance re-use, recycling and stewardship in the spaces within which we live.

Finally, and perhaps most destructive, is the impact that it will have on our customers. The program that this bill creates imposes significant costs, and we as an industry will have no choice but to pass at least some of those costs on to our customers. Obviously, this will just make things needlessly harder on the people we rely on to keep our businesses afloat, coming on top of already onerous price increases on fuel, food and all manner of consumer goods due to inflation and supply-chain challenges.

HB 1355 may be well-intentioned, but its real-world impact will be serious financial harm to distillers, breweries, wineries and related businesses, as well as our customers. Our businesses, ironically, are already doing more than our fair share to expand and promote re-use and recycling because it’s important to us.

Stephen Gould is owner of Golden Moon Distillery in Golden and a board member of the Colorado Distillers Guild.