Picking Up Nips Presents Great Challenge for Litter Patrollers
By Bonnie Phillips / ecoRI News staff
According to Bill McCusker, two of the most likely places to find discarded nip bottles are on highway entrance and exit ramps and, not surprisingly, in liquor store parking lots.
He should know — he’s helping oversee an effort to collect the
tiny, ubiquitous discarded liquor bottles in all 39 cities and towns in Rhode
Island. So far in the Great Nip Pickup Challenge, volunteers have
collected 34,800 nips over 60 days in 31 municipalities, he said. The goal is
to see how many discarded nip bottles can be collected in 90 days, from Dec. 27
of last year through March 27.
“We are a slobby society,” McCusker said. “I bet I could pick up
a couple dozen” off one highway ramp.
His organization, the Friends of the Saugatucket, along with other environmental groups, including Save The Bay, are planning to bring photos of all the nips collected so far to a rally scheduled for March 9 at 3:30 p.m. in the Statehouse library in support of this year’s version of a container deposit law, aka a “bottle bill.”
The bill (H5502) would give a 10-cent
refund for returned containers “not less than 50 milliliters nor greater than 3
liters.” A nip is about 1.7 ounces, or 50 milliliters.
Versions of such a bill have been introduced since the 1980s,
McCusker said, but one has yet to be passed. Last year’s bill “went to study,
where bills go to die,” he said.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Putting a deposit on nip bottles is fine. So is requiring they be recycled. But to me, the only real solution is to ban their sale. Nips are sold for the almost exclusive purpose of making drinking while driving more convenient. Why else would anyone buy them? I hate littering, but driving drunk is a life-threatening crime. - Will Collette
If the bottle bill is passed and each nip is worth 10 cents, it
would help reduce the number of nips thrown out, McCusker said. Getting 10
cents per bottle “could be an incentive for someone in need,” he said, “and a
win-win for the state.”
In states where there are container deposit laws, the recycling
rates are higher, studies have shown. For instance, Maine has a 5-cent deposit
on nip bottles, and it also happens to be the state with the highest recycling
rate, according to the 2021 50 States of Recycling report.
“A deposit return system would have minimal impact on the state budget, and achieve far greater results than litter pickup programs,” according to a January letter to Gov. Dan McKee urging the passage of such legislation.
The letter was signed by representatives of Clean Water Action, the
Conservation Law Foundation, Save The Bay, Clean Ocean Access, Just Zero, the
Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, Be The Solution to Pollution, the
Audubon Society of Rhode Island, the Environmental Council of Rhode Island, and
Zero Waste Providence.
Although he would prefer to see nips banned, McCusker said, a
deposit return would be a start.
“We need some sort of vehicle to take litter off the streets,”
he said. “A bottle bill is a way to pick up the litter as soon as it gets
dropped. The longer it sits, the more expensive it costs to pick up.”
Anyone can participate in the Great Nip Pickup Challenge,
McCusker said. Save The Bay has a recycling bin at the public pier at Fields Point in Providence
where collected nips can be dropped off. And the Friends of the Saugatucket
offers pickups that can be arranged through its Facebook page or by
emailing friendsofthesaugatucket@gmail.com.