House panel moves to expand Vermont’s ‘bottle bill’ to cover most beverages

Oct 17, 2023

By Fred Thys

Mar 6 2023March 8, 2023

An overhaul of the state's beverage redemption law — known as "the bottle bill" — has been recommended in a 10-1 vote by the House Committee on Environment and Energy. The committee moved to expand the law to cover most beverage containers and find new ways to pay for recycling.

The legislation, H.158, would update the half-century-old law to include water bottles, energy drinks and other popular beverages. It also seeks to reduce the burden on the state's beleaguered redemption centers, which are responsible for sorting and recycling the containers.

"Our redemption centers have come to us asking for relief," said Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury, who chairs the environment and energy committee.

Redemption centers have to sort bottles by brand, according to Josh Kelly, solid waste program manager at the Department of Environmental Conservation — and they regularly encounter more than 100 different brands.

"Redemption centers are already exceedingly strained by sorting," Kelly said.

Manufacturers now pay the centers a handling fee of 4 cents a bottle. The legislation would increase that to 5 cents a bottle.

Under the existing "bottle bill," plastic containers for carbonated beverages may be redeemed, but not plastic containers for uncarbonated beverages. As more beverages are bottled in plastic, manufacturers have expressed interest in getting their plastic bottles covered so they can recycle them, Sheldon said

The state's biggest waste management company, Rutland-based Casella Waste Systems, opposes the bill, arguing that plastic bottles are already being recycled.

"If you take that material out of our facility, then we don't have that material to sell back," said Jeff Weld, a spokesperson for Casella. Consumers would end up being charged more to recycle less valuable material, such as cardboard or paper, he said.

The manufacturers fee is different from the deposit customers pay when they buy a bottled beverage: 5 cents for most containers, 15 cents for hard liquor. Deposits would not necessarily increase if the bill becomes law, except for wine bottles, which require no deposit now but would jump to 15 cents in 2027.

The bill includes a provision to raise deposits eventually to 10 cents for most containers and 20 cents for wine bottles if the redemption program fails to meet certain targets.

Right now, the bottle bill covers beer, malt beverages, wine drinks (but not wine), carbonated water and soft drinks. By 2027, the new bill would cover most beverages except for dairy products, plant-based beverages, infant formula, meal replacement drinks and nonalcoholic cider.

Non-carbonated beverage containers holding more than 2.5 liters and carbonated beverage containers holding more than 3 liters would be exempt.

Under the changes, producers would band together to form a producer responsibility organization in charge of recycling. By 2025, once that organization is in place, it would collect the handling fee now going to redemption centers. When that happens, small stores of less than 5,000 square feet would be able to refuse to redeem bottles.

Last year, a bottle bill expansion made it through both chambers of the Legislature, but a final version did not make it to Gov. Phil Scott ahead of adjournment.

Now that H.158 has cleared the environment and energy committee, it's headed to the House Committee on Ways & Means. If passed by the House, it would then move to the Senate.

Correction: This story has been adjusted to better describe the push to expand the recycling law to cover more types of plastic containers.

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