The Club says it would cut down on litter in the environment.
Annapolis, Md (KM) One of the issues lawmakers in Annapolis could be grappling with this year is whether to enact a bottle bill. Martha Ainsworth, the Chair of Maryland Sierra Club’s Zero Waste Team, says a lot plastic bottles, cans and glass containers are ending up in the wrong places. “Despite the widespread availability of curbside recycling, only about a quarter of the containers are actually collected through recycling,” she said. “So three quarter of those containers—which is more than four billion containers a year—they’re left in the environment either in landfills, on roadsides, or in waterways, or incinerated.”
Ainsworth says more than five and a half billion beverage containers are sold in Maryland each year. “Of the four billion containers a year that aren’t being captured, 2.6 billion of them are plastic. When plastic is left in the environment., it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, micro plastics. It gets into the waterways; it affects wildlife; and now we know it affects all of us,” she says.
Under a bottle law, consumers would pay a deposit on beverage containers in addition to the price. But when they return the plastic bottles, cans or glass containers to the retailer, they receive that deposit back. “We are anticipating with a ten-cent refundable deposit on smaller containers, and 15 cents deposit up to three liters in size, we will get 90 percent of them back,” Ainsworth says.
She says the program would be run by the beverage makers who sell their products in Maryland. “They would be responsible for financing and implementing the program. And the Maryland Department of the Environment would select the organization and would provide substantial oversight of the operation. And the program would be basically self financing,” she says.
The Sierra Club says the program has a number of benefits, including a reduction in beverage container litter and plastic pollution, and an increase in water quality. It would also create new jobs in recycling, and in operating and servicing redemption technology, such as reverse vending machines which will divert containers from the waste stream.
Ainsworth says the Sierra Club commissioned a poll in 2024 which found a majority of Marylanders support a bottle law. “The average is about 90 percent of the respondents said they would somewhat or strongly support a bottle bill,” she said.
Also, the survey found most respondents were worried about the plastics from these containers getting into the environment. “95 percent of them were somewhat or very concerned about the impact of beverage container litter and plastic pollution,” she said. “The plastic pollution thing is a very, very compelling reason for doing this to keep plastic beverage containers out of the environment.”
The Sierra Club says ten states have bottle laws: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon and Vermont. The Club says recycling in these states ranges from 50 percent to 89 percent.
By Kevin McManus