Lawmaker Cohen Leads Senate Bottle Bill Passage To Reduce Waste

GUILFORD, CT — State Sen. Christine Cohen, Chair of the Environment Committee, led the state Senate in the near-unanimous passage of the bottle bill Wednesday. The measure now heads to the state House of Representatives.

The bill would have liquor wholesalers in the state to begin collecting a 5-cent surcharge on "nip" liquor bottles. Those funds would go to cities and towns to "fight the widespread litter of these little liquor bottles," according to a statement from Cohen.

The bill would, starting in 2024, increases the deposit from 5 to 10 cents on bottles including hard seltzer and hard cider as well as plant water, juice, juice drinks, tea, coffee, kombucha, plant infused drink, and sports and energy drinks.

A goal of the bottle bill is to help remove plastic and glass bottle litter from the environment, and how to address the popularity of new types of drinks – besides just soda and beer – to include the variety of hard seltzers, hard ciders, sports drinks, and other popular new beverages crowding grocery store aisles and the resulting litter in our environment, a news release on the bills' passage reads.

The issue of "nip" litter has been especially troublesome: with no deposit required on them, the tiny liquor bottles have become the focus of local, annual grassroots nip clean-up drives that can collect as many as 50,000 nip bottles in a single day from neighborhood streets, parks, riverbanks, forests, and storm drains, the news release reads.

The bill specifically requires that liquor wholesalers who sell nip bottles must pay 5 cents per bottle sold twice a year to the city or town where the nips were sold, with the money to be used by the town specifically for cleaning up any nip bottle trash by – for example – hiring a recycling coordinator, installing storm drain filters, or purchasing a mechanical street sweeper or vacuum to remove nip trash from streets, sidewalks and lawns.

To help address the issue of solid waste management, and to save municipalities money in their waste disposal costs, the bottle bill also directs the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to begin the in-state processing of no less than 80 percent of the wine and liquor bottles sold into Connecticut and turn them into furnace-ready broken glass ready for recycling to be used in cement, glass and fiberglass products.

"Functioning bottle deposit and return systems create more jobs and beautify our environment. But these systems need to be updated to reflect the times and current trends. And Connecticut has not updated its bottle deposit system in four decades,"Cohen said.

"But with this bill we have the ability to put a large dent in the environmental issues that outdated bottle return policies create. This is long overdue, and it's going to benefit our cities and towns, our environment, and our future generations."