Bottle Bill, Producer Responsibility Again Topics of Legislative Debate, with No Resolution in Sight

Looks like we're going to kick the can (and nips and water bottles) down the road again

By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff

House Environment and Natural Resources Committee Chair Rep. David Bennett, D-Warwick, tells the same story every year.

One year, for Christmas, he gave his 5-year-old grandson a toy truck. His grandson asked him for help opening the packaging on the truck, which had hard plastic, wire ties, buttons, and cardboard. It was difficult for his grandson to open, and, as Bennett tells the story, just as difficult for him as an adult to open.

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“It took me penny cutters, write cutters, scissors, and pliers just to open the packaging on the truck,” Bennett said during a committee hearing May 27. “About 15 minutes later I’m done, and I turn around and he’s got three more trucks.”

For years now, Bennett has told that story when introducing his legislation (H7910) for extended producer responsibility (EPR) program for packaging and paper. The program puts the onus on producers of plastic and paper packaging to come up with a recycling program for the materials.

There’s no easy way to recycle the hard plastic that encases toys, electronics, and other high-value products. The traditional catechism from some producers of some packaging is it makes it harder to shoplift and cuts down on theft — but it also all but guarantees packaging fills up Rhode Island’s already limited landfill.

“It’s a theft, we’re throwing all that stuff in our landfill,” Bennett said. “We have to pay for that.”

Stronger EPR legislation has struggled to make it out of the General Assembly in recent years, due in part to local business opposition to its close cousin, the bottle bill (H7911).

Bottle bills, or beverage container redemption systems, attach a fixed fee — 10 cents per container, according to this year’s legislation — that can be redeemed once returned to a recycling collection center.

The redemption fee is aimed at incentivizing consumers to recycle empty water bottles, soda bottles, and other plastic waste associated with drinks. Similar programs exist in Rhode Island already for two categories of products: mattresses and paint.

Bottle redemption programs, like EPR programs, are run by producer responsibility organizations, entities made up of the producers of the waste being recycled.

But bottle bills have been strongly opposed by a coterie of local business interests, including liquor store operators, convenience store owners, and some bottling facilities, such as the Coke bottling facility in Providence. They characterize bottle bills as “anti-business” and say they would make their businesses compete with nearby Massachusetts retailers.

Nicholas Fede, executive director of the Rhode Island Liquor Store Owners Collaborative and owner of Kingston Liquor Mart, said considering any legislation this year before a new cost-benefit analysis commissioned by the Department of Environmental Management would be premature.

“We’re interested to see the result of their study as you are,” Fede told the committee.

DEM is in the middle of a statewide implementation analysis on a future bottle bill. During a briefing to lawmakers on May 26, DEM director Terry Gray said the department had hired a third-party vendor, Resource Recycling Systems, to consult on the analysis and draw up a final report by Dec. 1 of this year.

The analysis was required by law last year, as part of the General Assembly’s endless appetite for continual study of bottle bill implementation. Prior to the statewide implementation analysis, lawmakers and stakeholders spent almost two years, starting in the fall of 2023, studying bottle bill implementation on their own. The final report was finished in the spring of 2025, and recommended the state implement both a bottle bill and an EPR program.

Despite all the studies, it seems opponents of the legislation are no closer to accepting any kind of compromise on improving recycling rates. Rep. Carol McEntee, D-South Kingstown, the prime sponsor of bottle bill legislation for five years now, noted much of the written opposition from liquor stores and other businesses focused on the law requiring them to collect recycled bottles, despite that requirement not being in the current version of her bill.

“You were on the study commission,” McEntee asked Fede. “You know that’s not something we recommended, it’s voluntary…. Why are they sending these letters if they know that’s not what we’re doing?”

“The mechanics of the bill allows return to retail, if large retailers are doing redemption, smaller retailers are going to have to do redemption to compete,” answered Fede. “If you’re redeeming your bottles at a large store, you’re not going to spend them at a small store.”

“But somebody’s got to take back the product whether a redemption center or site like a grocery store or university,” said McEntee. “We carved you out at the request of your members.”

“It’s not a carve-out, it’s an opt-out, and I stand by what I said regarding competition,” said Fede.

“It looks like misinformation to me,” said McEntee. “It’s clearly not what it says on the bill.”

Liquor store owners weren’t the only opponents this year. Beyond Plastics, a group working to end single use plastic waste nationwide, said it was opposed to this year’s legislation because it gave too much power to the producers to regulate themselves. The packaging EPR bill would allow the producers to set their own recycling goals instead of DEM.

“This process is still skewed heavily in favor of industry; it gives them the first swing of creating regulations for themselves,” said Jonathan Bedard, policy director for Beyond Plastics.

Plastic waste in Rhode Island is a growing problem. Last year’s report on the International Coastal Cleanup, organized and written by the Providence-based nonprofit Save The Bay, found 30% of all plastic trash — the largest single category reported — littering the Rhode Island coastline were single-use drinking plastics: bottles, straws, containers, cans and other related material.

The top two inches of the seabed floor of Narragansett Bay are estimated to contain more than 1,000 tons of microplastics. And on land, the Central Landfill in Johnston, the state’s centralized and only remaining waste disposal site, is expected to reach its full capacity by 2046, and Rhode Island doesn’t have a plan for where to dump the state’s trash after it closes.

The bottle bill especially offers a solution to the state’s monster plastic problem. Take nips, the small containers of alcohol sold at liquor stores, for example. In previous litter surveys they made up the biggest category, and they’re unable to be recycled because the recycling equipment at the Central Landfill can’t capture and sort the containers due to their small size.

And recycling isn’t working in Rhode Island. In cities like Providence, tons of recycling are rejected every year due to contamination, charging the city millions in extra fees, and adding to the rapidly dwindling capacity of the state’s landfill.

Other states have shown bottle bills can help boost recycling rates, and Rhode Island’s overall recycling rate remains low at 26%.

No matter the need, or the results of the cost analysis, opposition to the bottle bill is not going to disappear, Jed Thorp, director of advocacy for Save The Bay, told the House committee.

“The General Assembly is going to have to make a tough political decision whether it’s this year, next year or the year after about what to do. Are we going to do this or are we going to not do this?” said Thorp. “Some of the opponents are going to be opposed to this no matter what the outcome is.”