Kathleen Stauffer, CEO of The Arc Eastern Connecticut, hates finding those miniature glass liquor bottles called nips littering streets.
“We’ve got these little liquor bottles everywhere,” she said.
Stauffer, who often picks up the empty nips off roadsides, said she often finds one, finds a beer can 30 or 40 yards beyond it and a second nip a short distance beyond that. She guesses that means the driver was drinking two shots and a beer while behind the wheel.
“People are driving, drinking them and throwing them out the window,” Stauffer said.
She favors putting a deposit on the nip bottles like those on beer and soda to reduce litter and stop the behavior.
“The current setup is facilitating drinking and driving,” Stauffer said. “It’s a public health hazard on several levels. … The message we’re sending to our kids as they go to the bus stop is not a good one.”
The Arc, a nonprofit organization that serves people who have intellectual and developmental disabilities, has a redemption center in Woodstock that processes deposit bottles and cans people drop off.
Stauffer said 1.6 million bottles and cans were processed there in 2018.
It employs six to 12 people who have disabilities. “It’s a great training ground,” Stauffer said. “It teaches basic responsibilities.”
State law provides Connecticut’s 19 redemption centers – the Arc’s is the only one in Eastern Connecticut – with a handling fees of 1.5 cents per beer container and 2 cents for other containers.
“The fee doesn’t cover the cost of sorting and cleaning,” Stauffer said. “We’re losing $50,000 a year. We can’t do it and we’re not going to do it.”
The Arc has invited state Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, co-chairwoman of the Environment Committee, and other legislators to tour the Woodstock facility on Monday morning to press for changes to the state’s bottle bill so redemption centers can stay open.
A bill was introduced in the state legislature in March that would have greatly changed the state’s bottle law, which dates from 1978.
The bill, which was supported by the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont, would have doubled the deposit on bottles and cans of soda, beer and water to 10 cents, added juice, tea, sports drinks and energy drinks to containers that needed deposits and put 25 cent deposits on glass wine and liquor bottles.
Handling fees paid to redemption centers would have gone up to 3.5 cents for beer containers and 4.5 cents for other containers.
Two local legislators, state Rep. Kevin Ryan, D-Montville, and state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, also sponsored a bill in the last session to put a 5 cent deposit on nip bottles, which mirrored a proposal by Lamont.
“People find them incredibly annoying,” Ryan said.
Jeff Pierce, who owns Norwich Wine & Spirits, agreed.
“It’s just aggravating. I see them everywhere,” he said.
The motivation for the changes was not only to further reduce litter and help redemption centers, but to take more glass out of the state’s recycling stream. When bottles break, they become very difficult and expensive to recycle.
In addition, in previous years, recyclable material often has been shipped to China, where workers there clean and sort it. But in the last year or so, China has mostly stopped paying for U.S. recyclables.
“This is a big thing we’ve been dealing with,” Griswold First Selectman Todd Babbitt said. In past years, Griswold was being paid $4 or $5 per ton of recyclable material. “Now they want to charge us about $60 a ton to take it.”
So a goal of the bills was to reduce the expenses cities and towns are now facing for disposing recyclable material.
Neither bill became law. As the legislative session neared its end in June, a substitute bill passed the House that instead of changing the bottle law would have created a task force to study the issue. That proposal never got to a vote in the Senate.
The nip deposit bill was referred to the Environment Committee, where it died.
Bottle law proposals are expected to be considered again in 2020, however. “I think we’re going to look at it again,” Ryan said.
Pierce said he would like to see a deposit on nips but he doesn’t think there’s a way now to make it workable. Currently, when customers redeem deposit bottles and cans at package stores, the containers are stored and picked up every few weeks by distributors, which then reimburse the package stores for the deposits. Pierce said distributors don’t want nips.
“I really don’t know if the deposit is going to happen,” he said.
Paul Agranovitch, who owns Universal Discount Package Store in Norwich, said customers should return deposit containers directly to recyclers.
“We should not be part of the system,” he said. “It should be on the garbage industry.”
“We don’t feel the last bill went far enough on a lot of fronts,” Stauffer said. She said she favors raising the deposit on beer, soda and water to 15 cents and putting a 25 cent deposit on nips.
The higher deposits not only are an incentive for people to not litter or throw bottles and cans in with the regular trash, when people do litter, the deposits encourage others to pick them up and turn them in for the deposit money, she said.
