By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff

This story was originally published in EcoRI News, a publication partner of Ocean State Stories

PROVIDENCE — Is it time, or even feasible, for Rhode Island to create a combined program that recycles both plastic beverage containers and packaging on consumer products?

It’s the question at the heart of the state’s latest analysis laying out five separate scenarios to tackle its growing recycling and litter problem.

Liquor stores, bottling companies, and other businesses have strongly opposed efforts to pass a redemption system for beverage containers, commonly known as the bottle bill, for years.

At the end of the 2025 legislative session, the General Assembly, seeking compromise or perhaps just a reason to kick the proverbial can down the road, authorized the Rhode Island Department of Environment Management to investigate the possible implementation of a redemption system.

Now the public is getting its say, as DEM officials in recent weeks have been soliciting public comment. It’s a regular part of the administrative process, and the battle lines drawn at Wednesday’s public hearing show stakeholders and advocates remain split on the study and implementation of new recycling programs.

“We’re surrounded by states that do this, and they’re not suffering,” Rep. Carol McEntee, D-North Kingstown, said at the Nov. 4 public hearing. “Their businesses are doing fine. Their liquor stores are still selling liquor. Their Coca-Cola companies are still selling Coke. Nobody is really suffering.”

McEntee has been a longtime sponsor of the bottle bill, and it’s prime legislative sponsor for years. She also chaired a two-year study commission, which performed its own investigation on recycling systems.

For McEntee, it’s always come down to practicality. Rhode Island’s recycling remains low, with plenty of tons of recyclable material skirting the Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) at the Central Landfill in Johnston.

The latest report from the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation shows that in 2025 the MRF rejected 25,335 tons of recyclable material for not meeting the facility’s minimum standards. That material was buried instead.

Under bottle bill and extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs, responsibility for the costs and operation of recycling programs would typically fall on producers of the material being recycled, such as bottlers or packaging manufacturers. It’s this extra cost that haas motivated the business lobby to aggressively oppose such expanded recycling programs.

While the endpoint of recycling is the same, Rhode Island doesn’t have a unified recycling policy. The state’s 39 cities and towns are responsible for curbside pickup of trash and recyclable materials and while bins for each are common across the state, how municipalities choose to bring trash and recycling to the landfill and MRF vary.

Municipalities can own trucks or outsource collection to a private hauler. Some municipalities only truck trash and recycling from a transfer station, and some are experimenting with pay-as-you-throw programs, where residents pay for the bags to dispose of non-recyclable waste.

“What I was looking for is the most effective way to get all of these pollutants, plastic, glass, aluminum, and packaging out of the environment,” McEntee said. “Dispose of it properly. Reuse it.”

While McEntee was one of the few voices at the hearing providing support to the implementation plan, plenty of others, including businesses, private recyclers, and even some circular economy experts, questioned some of the data or lack of transparency in the plan’s assumptions.

Businesses, such as North Kingstown-based Toray Plastics, opposed the implementation plan due to its “significant cost.” Joshua Cloutier, director of new product development, said his company would have to pass the costs of an EPR program to its customers.

This sentiment was echoed by Bill Fischer, a lobbyist for the Consumer Brands Association, an industry organization for packaged goods. He expressed concerns about the costs and the flawed assumptions baked into the report’s scenarios.

“We’re concerned about some of the assumptions that these scenarios rely on, including achieving a 65 percent recycling rate and reducing recycling facilities contamination from 21 to 11 percent,” Fischer said. “These assumptions provide a thoughtful evaluation standpoint, but they’re not supported by mature or verified performance data in U.S. packaging programs.”

John Berard, policy director at Beyond Plastics, a think tank devoted to eliminating plastic waste, said he supported the bottle bill, but said Rhode Island should “pump the brake” on EPR legislation.

He said Circular Action Alliance, the entity responsible for running EPR programs in seven states, typically included chemical recycling — a process that breaks down plastics through heat, pressure, or chemical solvents — to achieve its goals.

Rhode Island’s lawmakers have repeatedly rejected efforts to legalize chemical recycling or other related plastic recycling processes such as pyrolysis. Environmentalists characterize it as a form of greenwashing, with little actual recycling being done.

“It’s important that we’re clear-eyed about what it entails to actually achieve policy goals,” Berard said. “We cannot effectively manage or recycle plastics at the end of their useful lives. That’s why we’re all here, right? So why would we include them in a recycling bill and expect that implementation will ultimately be successful?”

DEM is accepting public comment on its statewide recycling study through Nov 16.