Vermont Senate moves ahead with overhauled bottle bill that would cover most beverage containers

Jun 01, 2023

By Fred Thys

May 10 2023May 10, 2023

The Senate moved ahead with an overhaul of the state's beverage redemption law — "the bottle bill" — by a vote of 19-11 Wednesday.

"It keeps more containers out of our landfills and out of our roadsides," Sen. Becca White, D-Windsor, told colleagues as she presented H.158 in debate.

Under the half-century-old law, deposits paid for returned containers are intended to encourage consumers to recycle them at redemption centers.

The legislation would newly include water bottles, energy drinks and other popular beverages, and find new ways to pay for recycling.

It also seeks to reduce the burden on the state's beleaguered redemption centers, which are responsible for sorting and recycling the containers.

The House passed its own version of the bill in March, and differences in the two versions will need to be ironed out. The Senate version still requires final approval by the Senate before the two versions can be reconciled.

Redemption centers have to sort bottles by brand, and they deal regularly with more than 100 brands.

"We have not changed the fee to keep pace with redemption," White said.

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

The manufacturer's fee is different from the deposit customers pay when they buy a bottled beverage: 5 cents for most containers, 15 cents for hard liquor. They get the money back when they return the containers to a redemption center.

Deposits would not necessarily increase if the bill became law, except for wine bottles, which require no deposit now but would jump to 15 cents in 2027.

The bill requires at least three redemption centers per county — and Sen. Randy Brock, R-Franklin, said three is not enough.

"What does it cost the consumer?" Brock asked, referring to the miles people would have to drive to a redemption center and the time spent idling in their cars in line at the center. Brock voted against the bill.

White warned that, if the bill does not pass, redemption centers could go out of business and people would have to travel farther.

"Maybe it's time to design a better system," Brock said, suggesting that single-stream recycling or increasing the deposits by higher amounts might be better solutions.

Under existing law, plastic containers for carbonated beverages can be redeemed, but not plastic containers for noncarbonated beverages. As more beverages are bottled in plastic, manufacturers have expressed interest in getting their plastic bottles covered so they can recycle them.

The state's biggest waste management company, Rutland-based Casella Waste Systems, opposes the bill, arguing that plastic bottles are already being recycled without incentives like a deposit.

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

The main difference between the House and Senate versions of the bill has to do with deposits.

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

The Senate bill would get rid of those proposed increases and leave it up to the secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources to make recommendations on whether deposits should be increased.

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.

"Expanding the bottle bill just makes sense," White said.

Noncarbonated beverage containers holding more than 2.5 liters and carbonated beverage containers holding more than 3 liters would be exempt, as would 50-mL liquor bottles.

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.

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