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Volunteers advocate for 'bottle bill' to curb nip bottle litter in Rhode Island


A trash can full of nip bottles. (WJAR){ }
A trash can full of nip bottles. (WJAR)
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For decades now, Rhode Island has not passed a bottle bill that would, among other things, require a 5- or 10-cent deposit on containers for alcohol.

Advocates of the law say that would go a long way toward fixing the growing problem of litter from those little “nip” bottles.

Volunteers showed NBC 10 News hundreds of thousands of discarded nip bottles that were collected across Ocean State since the end of December.

"I figured out after a while they can fit down a catch basin and make their way out into the storm drain out into the river. That's why we're finding so many of them out there," said Friends of the Saugatucket volunteer Bill McCusker.

Saugatucket's 90-day “Great Nip Pickup Challenge” was started two years ago, focused just on that river's nine-mile watershed, from North Kingstown through Wakefield.

"They make their way out the estuary, out to Block Island Sound,” said McCusker. “They get caught up in the environment, break down, microplastics, and it goes on from there."

One huge staggering pile, collected and displayed for NBC 10 in a parking area off Route 1 in South Kingstown, represents one week's worth of nip bottles from across the of Rhode Island. That's about 615 of them a day.

This year, the nonprofit environmental group Save The Bay has helped make the nip pickup challenge statewide. July Lewis heads up the volunteer outreach program.

"You just walk down the street, look at the sidewalk you'll see them,” she said. “Look at the gutter, you'll see them. Any parking lot, any beaches. Any time there's a storm, a big rack line washes up," on coastal beaches, both bayside and oceanside.

"It's gotten to the point where people want to see something done," added Topher Hamblett from Save The Bay.

The groups are documenting what's collected, and will hold a rally at the Rhode Island Statehouse Thursday, March 9, 3:30 p.m., to once-and-for-all urge legislators to pass a bottle bill. The bill would rival, if not "best," the 5 cents-per-container deposit on nip bottles now a law in Maine.

Massachusetts and Connecticut have bottle bills too, but no deposit provision on nip bottles.

"The real way to address the problem? Put a value on these containers so they can be redeemed, kept off the beaches and the streets," Hamblett added.

"We are addicted to plastic in our society. We've got to find a way to wean ourselves off," emphasized McCusker.

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