While conducting her doctoral studies at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO), Anna Robuck examined the stomach contents from 217 seabirds—great shearwaters—collected from the Gulf of Maine all the way to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Because they forage for fish by plunging underwater from the air or by seizing items while swimming on the surface, nearly every bird she dissected contained high levels of plastic in its stomach.

When great shearwaters consume plastic, they experience “false satiation,” leading to starvation. Biologists consider them excellent species to detect risks to humans because they traverse both the North and South Atlantic and reflect plastic ingestion across the entire Atlantic basin.

“The most recognizable type of plastic we found were fragments of bottle caps, like from soda bottles,” says Robuck, now an Environmental Protection Agency staff scientist. “The cap fragments retained their shape and ridging and sometimes even the lettering, so it was easy to tell what they were.”

They’re easy to find on beaches and public streets, too. Microplastics can come from anything plastic, from clothing to car tires, but a significant portion comes from the disintegration of improperly disposed plastic litter. J.P. Walsh, a professor at GSO, and his student Victoria Fulfer calculated there were more than 16 trillion pieces, the equivalent of 1,000 tons of plastic, in the top two inches of sediment of Narragansett Bay. Meanwhile, in just three months of 2023, Friends of the Saugatucket collected 80,000 empty nip bottles from roadsides, riverbanks, and beaches. The group focused on the tiny bottles because they can fit down storm drains and make their way into rivers and ultimately bays and oceans.

The sheer volume of plastic litter accumulating across Rhode Island is forcing legislators and concerned industry leaders to reconsider a “bottle bill” that would incentivize plastic and glass recycling measures across the state. It would create a 10-cent deposit on every plastic and glass bottle and aluminum can sold in the state, including nips.

Under proposed legislation, retailers like supermarkets, liquor stores, and corner stores would pay a deposit to their beverage distributors for each bottle or can. Consumers would then pay this deposit at the point of sale, but get that deposit refunded when they return the empty container to any retailer or independent redemption center. Those retailers and redemption centers would then turn over the collected containers to a beverage distributor, who would reimburse them for the deposits, pay a handling fee, and sell the source-separated containers to recyclers.

Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont all have versions of this legislation and recover as much as 75% of cans and bottles. Rhode Island only collects about a third in its recycling system and has struggled to enact regulations that would further improve its success.

The need to compromise is vital, says Jed Thorp, advocacy coordinator for Save The Bay.

“We need a bill that doesn’t place a lot of burden on the retailers, so the liquor stores and grocery stores are somehow not responsible for having to handle and process the empty containers,” says Thorp. “If you can put most of the handling costs and responsibilities on a separate entity, I think liquor stores could be okay with it.”

That separate entity would be a third party, called a producer responsibility organization (PRO), tasked with handling the entire system.

In Oregon, beverage distributors formed the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative (OBRC) that has resulted in them being able to process more than 2 billion containers for domestic recycling two years in a row. In addition to paying the deposit, like in Massachusetts or Connecticut, beverage brands in Oregon pay to handle all of the recyclables. They reported a return rate of 87% in 2023.

Beverage brands like this system because OBRC is charged with administering it, so they don’t have to. Retailers like it because a lot of the returns happen offsite and not at retail locations. Consumers like it because they have a system where a user creates an account, tosses a bag of recyclable cans and bottles off at a centralized location with a QR code, machines sort the recyclables, and then the user’s account is reimbursed with the deposit.

Rhode Island’s proposed bottle bill legislation has previously included a controversial “return to retail” requirement. Individual stores would be responsible for maintaining and operating reverse vending machines that take recyclables back, scan them to identify the material, and provide a reward to the user, like a coupon for a future purchase.

Pushback from industry leaders suggests that retail space is limited, says Nicholas Fede, executive director of the Rhode Island Liquor Operators Collaborative and co-owner of Kingstown Liquor Mart in North Kingstown.

“Mixing redemption into an already small retail environment would be a significant detriment to small, family-run businesses.”

Fede also worries about how changing the market in Rhode Island will affect regional recycling programs.

“If Rhode Island were to enact a bottle deposit system that had a different reimbursement level than Massachusetts, there is no question that interstate redemption fraud would occur,” he says.

In 2023, a family from Arizona (where there is no bottle bill) was accused of smuggling 178 tons of aluminum cans and plastic bottles—worth $7.6 million—to California to exploit their recycling programs. To combat redemption fraud, other states have enacted safeguards such as establishing how many containers an individual can redeem each week or during a single visit.

Both Fede and environmental advocates agree that litter is a huge problem, but by following Oregon’s lead, a solution could be in the offing.

“The beverage industry is very supportive of Oregon’s bottle bill,” says OBRC’s Liz Philpott, public relations and BottleDrop Give program coordinator for OBRC. “Creating a statewide cooperative simplified and streamlined operations.”

Oregon was the first state to sign a bottle bill into legislation in 1971, and it designated beverage distributors as industry stewards, responsible for managing the flow of deposits, redemption, and collecting redeemed beverage containers from retailers. The law placed responsibility on retailers to redeem containers they sell. Initially, Oregon’s bottle bill only allowed consumers to return bottles and cans to retail stores, but since then, the state has created specialized redemption centers, offering reverse vending machines and special “green bags” for individual households and “blue bags” specifically for nonprofits.

Oregon has set up a sophisticated system to process bags of recyclable material and scan individual RFID tags located on every bag to ensure deposits get credited to the correct account. In 2023, $208.8 million was paid to customers returning containers, with 80% of returns coming through BottleDrop locations.

More than 5,600 nonprofits participated last year in redeeming containers, collecting more than $5.5  million. Households that return bags full of cans and bottles are allowed to receive a deposit, or they can receive 20% more if they choose to accept store credit.

“By creating an isolated stream just for beverage containers, the recycling process is more efficient and produces a reliable source of high-grade recyclable material,” says Philpott.

Instead, Rhode Island’s current recycling system involves throwing glass, plastic, aluminum, and paper into the big blue bin and hoping that it all gets sorted in the state’s materials recycling facility (MRF).

Built in 1989 and re-serviced in 2012, the MRF is responsible for handling 350-400 tons of mixed recyclable materials from every municipality in the state. Material that doesn’t get sorted by the MRF, or gets rejected visually before ever making it to the MRF, is sent to the Central Landfill in Johnston, which is expected to reach capacity before 2040. Unfortunately, only 15 of the 39 municipalities exceeded the state-mandated 35% recycling rate, with many residents disposing of their recyclables in the trash instead.

Materials that can’t be recycled, such as broken glass, containers with liquids, and frozen food boxes, reduce the quality of the recyclable materials that are eventually sold to make new products. While a recycling hauler may be contractually obligated to take recyclables from a specified recycling bin, the MRF is not required to process it, and if there’s excess contamination, then the entire load will be sent to the landfill.

“Single-stream recycling has proven to be bad for the overall recovery rates of recycled materials,” says Fede, who is also part of a Rhode Island legislative study commission to explore the bottle bill and ultimately how to improve waste management in the state. “Separating recyclables into different categories produces cleaner containers that have a higher resale value on the raw materials market.”

 

 

“There’s an idea that more and better technology will always improve systems,” says Carla Doughty, projects coordinator with Zero Waste Providence, one of the advocacy groups in a coalition to educate people about the bottle bill. “I wish we would transition back to thorough source separation because there is a disconnect between our consumption habits and the idea that the waste will just ‘go away.’”

Providence is an ideal city in which to begin transformation of Rhode Island’s recycling systems because at only 7.8%, they have the lowest recycling rate in the state. Instead of wishing the MRF could perform miracles, Doughty and Zero Waste Providence are instead opting for targeted recycling outreach.

In late 2024, the Zero Waste Providence outreach team, composed of paid volunteers, was awarded funding and authorized to canvass residents via door knocking, attend community events, and inspect more than 38,000 residential curbside carts, leaving supportive feedback as to what can/cannot go in the recycling bin.

“As a collective society, we have an individual responsibility to recycle bottles and cans,” says Doughty. “An attitude shift and the habit change at the household level is critical.”

To demonstrate the need for action on such a bill, Save The Bay collected 43,000 beverage containers and beverage container pieces across one-third of Rhode Island’s shoreline during the International Coastal Cleanup in July 2023.

If a bottle bill does get passed, the days of seeing bottles and cans thrown away haphazardly may become a relic of the past because consumers will realize their inherent worth. Still, if bottles and cans do remain unredeemed, then all those deposits would have to go somewhere.

In Oregon, the OBRC reports that $21.8 million was collected from non-redeemed deposits–an amount that went back into funding for the overall program. Just as in Oregon, experts believe unredeemed deposits would likely be retained by the PRO in Rhode Island to operate and improve the deposit return system, hopefully improving the circular economy of plastics overall in the state.

“All over the Earth’s surface, from mountaintops to the ocean floor–plastic is pervasive at this point,” explains URI Professor of Oceanography Walsh. “We find microplastics in almost every organism that we have sampled.”

In 2023, the advocacy of the environmental non-profits around this issue spurred the Rhode Island General Assembly to create a joint study commission, of which Fede and Thorp, along with state senators, representatives, and other experts in the field, are a part, to study the problem and its proposed solutions. The 20-member commission has held more than 24 hours of meetings to hear from different experts from around the country with the goal of creating a comprehensive study identifying ways to improve the state’s recycling efforts. A full report should be completed by spring.

“We know every body of water in the state has microplastics,” concludes Save The Bay’s Thorp. “We know that beverage containers are the most collected item during shoreline cleanups. We have to acknowledge that we need to do the most proven-effective policy that we can adopt, and that’s to enact a bottle bill.”