A 2024 report from Save The Bay, measuring and counting all the litter picked up one day along the state’s shoreline, showed that 29% of all the trash collected by volunteers were drinking related — bottles, cans, lids, cups, straws, and other associated trash.
This story was originally published by ecoRI News, a publication partner of Ocean State Stories.
PROVIDENCE — With just weeks left to go on the General Assembly’s legislative clock, this year’s battle lines around bottle bill legislation are sharper than ever.
In one corner are environmental groups, anti-litter advocates, and a few local businesses backing legislation (H6207) that would create a bottle deposit redemption system and an extended producer responsibility, also known as EPR for short, program for paper and packaging. Advocates say it’s the only solution after years of study and debate that will finally raise Rhode Island’s dismal recycling rates and take a bite out of the state’s growing plastic litter problem.
In the other corner is the powerful beverage industry, made up of wholesalers, bottling companies, and liquor stores, that alleges the proposed 10-cent deposit fee attached to every bottle or can sold amounts to a drastic tax that will stick local businesses with new onerous costs, reduce their competitiveness with others across the state line, and hurt the local economy.
For both sides, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The joint study commission on plastic waste, commissioned two years ago to study the bottle bill further, concluded its work earlier this year, recommending lawmakers pass a joint bottle bill/EPR system, over the objection of the panel’s beverage industry representatives.
“If a tanker had a major oil spill in Narragansett Bay, who would we expect to clean it up?” asked Rep. Carol McEntee, D-South Kingstown, prime sponsor of the joint legislation and former co-chair of the bottle bill study commission. “The owners of the oil. The person who’s responsible for the product, and what we have here is a slow leak of pollutants into our bodies, into our waterways, and into our environment.”
How would this year’s combined bill work? It creates nonprofit entities, one for plastic bottle containers under the bottle bill system, and another for paper packaging under the EPR legislation. Known as producer responsibility organizations (PROs), it would be up to the producer companies themselves to run the system collecting the plastic and paper waste stemming from their products. Lawmakers said when drafting the bill they copied a similar system in Oregon.
Plastic, glass, and aluminum containers would fall under the bottle redemption system. Cardboard and other paper packaging would be the responsibility of the EPR program.
Customers buying cans or bottles would pay a 10-cent deposit per container at checkout. The legislation doesn’t require retailers or wholesalers to pay additional fees or taxes; the fee is paid entirely by the customer. The customers can then redeem their 10 cents at any designated recycling station. Unclaimed fees are fed directly back into the collection system, and not, as often happens in the Statehouse, moved to the general fund.
The legislation doesn’t specify one particular redemption system, listing bag-drops, reverse vending machines, and other known mechanisms, with an eye toward leaving the specifics of the program to be worked out by the PROs. As written, businesses aren’t required to redeem containers under the program, unless they specifically request it.
“This is a very different bottle bill than what’s been introduced before the General Assembly, and directly addresses many of the concerns and recommendations from groups who have opposed previous versions,” McEntee said.
For the state’s environmental groups, the legislation is the only solution to Rhode Island’s growing plastic problem. Rhode Island collects all recyclable material — plastic, cardboard, paper, and aluminum — in the same bins, a method known as single-stream recycling. Recycling rates remain low across the state. Providence, for example, spends millions every year on tipping fees, trash, and recycling hauling, and the city’s recycling rate remains in the single digits. The rest of the state’s municipalities aren’t doing much better. Only 17, out of the remaining 38 municipalities, meet or exceed the required 35% recycling rate outlined in state law.
“At no point in the country or across the world has a single-stream program, even in combination with an EPR program for packaging, performed at the type of recycling rates that a bottle bill with a redemption network can perform,” said Kevin Budris, deputy director of Just Zero.
Rhode Island is only starting to understand the impact locally purchased plastic is having on the environment. A 2024 report from Save The Bay, measuring and counting all the litter picked up one day along the state’s shoreline, showed that 29% of all the trash collected by volunteers were drinking related — bottles, cans, lids, cups, straws, and other associated trash.
A 2023 study from researchers at the University of Rhode Island found that the top 5 centimeters of the floor of Narragansett Bay contained more than 1,000 tons of microplastics, defined as plastic pieces 5 centimeters or smaller. The bulk of that plastic accumulation occurred over the past two decades.
The beverage industry doesn’t dispute there’s a recycling or plastic litter problem in Rhode Island, but it does disagree about its cause and the solutions. A redemption system, said Nicholas Fede, the executive director of the Rhode Island Liquor Owners Collaborative and owner of the Kingstown Liquor Mart, “is a punch-down tax on the less fortunate.”
“A bottle tax won’t stop the behavioral disorder that is littering,” he said.
Fede, and other members of the beverage industry, say they prefer to beef up the existing materials recycling facility (known as the MRF) near the Central Landfill with artificial intelligence or other new technologies to enhance the sorting performed by the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC), in conjunction with better education among state residents. The MRF in Johnston, they noted, hasn’t had any infrastructure updates since 2012.
They also only support an EPR-only bill, H6205, over a bottle bill or the combination bottle bill and EPR legislation, a sentiment not shared by environmental advocates who prefer any kind of bottle redemption system.
Mark Perlman, CEO of Ocean State Job Lot, which already operates in other states with bottle bill programs, testified at the House Environment and Natural Resources Committee this week that the bill would increase the cost of goods for businesses, without seeing a lot of benefit.
Perlman contended that, while some studies showed an increase in sales at stores that hosted a redemption site, it wasn’t the experience of stores like Job Lot. Customers, he said, are more likely to redeem them at grocery stores, where they stop more regularly.
“Just because we’re used to it as a company, doesn’t mean I’m in favor of it,” Perlman said. “Forty bottles of water at Walmart is $5.69. After the bottle bill it’ll be $9.69. You think every one of these bottles are coming back?”
While bottle redemption systems and EPR programs may boost recycling rates, it’s not expected to have a significant impact if passed on the lifespan of the landfill. Jared Rhodes, director of policy and programs at RIRRC, told committee members the landfill is estimated to reach capacity by 2046.
RIRRC had pushed the capacity date back by diverting a lot of construction debris and other waste away from the landfill, but taking away plastic bottles or other containers was unlikely to move the needle.
“Our estimates ranged from it taking 88 years of a bottle bill to save a single year’s worth of landfill capacity to beyond that,” Rhodes said. “We’re landfilling nearly 650,000 tons of material a year. It would take a lot of beverage containers diverted from that flow to gain more capacity.”
H6207 was held for further study.
