Vermont’s bottle redemption system, commonly called the “bottle bill,” relies on a law passed in 1972 — before some of today’s common beverages broadly entered the market.
A bill working its way through the state Legislature would modernize the law and expand what it includes.
The redemption system charges consumers a deposit, worth a few cents, when they buy certain beverages, then allows them to recoup that money when they return the empty containers to redemption centers and retail markets.
The bill passed the Vermont House last spring and is now before the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy, where lawmakers are currently taking testimony.
As passed by the House, H.175, the bill currently under consideration, would keep the deposit the same. Lawmakers have gone back and forth about whether to raise the deposit to 10 cents, something currently being considered by the Senate Natural Resources Committee. The state channels the uncollected money to funding for the Clean Water Act.
Right now, the law covers beer and other malt beverages, mineral waters, mixed wine drinks, soda water, carbonated soft drinks and liquor. That leaves out a host of common drinks such as wine, hard cider, bottled water and sports drinks, which now make up a large portion of the beverage market in Vermont.
Under the new bill, manufacturers and distributors of beverage containers reimburse people who operate participating retailers and redemption centers at between 3.5 and 5 cents per container, depending on whether the recycled items are mingled together or separated.
Reloop, an environmental nonprofit organization, recently conducted a study that explains the benefits Northeastern states could get from modernized bottle bills. In Vermont, it could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8,000 metric tons each year.
Nationally, 140 billion beverage containers are wasted — buried, burned or littered — each year, said Elizabeth Balkan, director of Reloop North America.
“Each of those beverage containers has embodied energy or an embedded carbon footprint because of the energy and resources needed to extract the raw materials, to manufacture the packaging, to transport it,” she said.
The bill has received pushback, however. One argument against the bill says it’s an added cost to consumers who have to pay more at the checkout counter and lose the money unless they bring the materials back.
John Casella, chairman and CEO of Casella Waste Systems, which operates curbside recycling services in the state, wrote in a commentary for VTDigger that the updated bill would affect single-stream recycling programs by removing valuable materials, which could drive up the cost for consumers. Redemption systems can also be more costly than single-stream systems, he wrote.
The success of the redemption program and the single-stream system are comparable, he argues. Vermonters recycled 72% of eligible paper and containers from single-stream programs, such as curbside recycling, according to a 2019 report from the Agency of Natural Resources.
Vermont’s current redemption system is responsible for a 75% return rate of the covered beverages, but it’s still fallen behind “nearly every other state,” Marcie Gallagher, an environmental advocate at Vermont Public Interest Research Group, told lawmakers last week. Maine, for example, covers 91% percent of the beverages on the market, while Vermont’s law covers only 46%.
More than 10,000 Vermonters have signed a petition supporting the bill, Gallagher said. The organization has been advocating strongly for expansion of the bottle bill, saying redemption systems make it easier to recycle in an efficient, closed loop — that is, nothing is wasted or added into the system, and many bottles can be remade into new containers.
Waste materials in the single-stream recycling program are often more contaminated and less likely to become new products, according to VPIRG.
Matt Chapman, director of the Waste Management Prevention Division at the state’s Agency of Natural Resources, told lawmakers there are “significantly more recycling opportunities for glass” through the bottle bill than through the state’s Universal Recycling Law, which bans certain materials from Vermont’s landfills.
“We’re slightly agnostic as to the system that it gets collected through,” Chapman said. “I think there are clearly cost implications. But to some degree, our goal and objective is to basically conserve landfill capacity, maximize the amount of materials being recycled.”
The committee will take additional testimony later this week.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly quantified the proposed bottle deposit listed in the most recent version of the bill.
