Bottle bills are notoriously hard to pass, but stakeholders hope to change that by leaning on emerging local and national economic trends.
In the U.S., 10 states have laws governing container deposit return systems, but some of the existing laws are decades old. Few new bills pass each year to update or expand that list. This year, as the Trump administration continues to emphasize domestic supply chains and an “America First” attitude, some bottle bill proponents are playing up the idea that deposit return systems help strengthen manufacturing supply chains and discourage the use of imported materials to make new containers.
Bottle bill policy conversations are also intersecting more and more often with conversations about extended producer responsibility for packaging. Some bottle bill supporters worry that the rise in popularity of EPR bills could divert too much attention away from bottle deposit conversations. Yet as states like Oregon and Colorado implement their EPR programs, some policymakers may warm to the idea that bottle bills and packaging EPR could work hand in hand to maximize recycling rates and recycled content availability.
Other messaging trends in 2026 include an expanded focus on bottle bills’ “budget conscious” messaging — the idea that “recycling refunds” could help clean up local neighborhoods while also putting money back in people’s pockets. This sentiment is already seen in places like Washington state and Washington, D.C., especially as worries about the U.S. economy continue.
But even as proponents update their strategies to pass bills in new states or work to update existing bottle bill programs, opponents are also organizing their own efforts to block the legislation. Some in the business community, including grocery associations and beverage distributors, continue to argue that bottle bills create a tax that is passed on to the consumer. And some MRF operators continue to oppose bottle bills that they say would divert valuable material away from their facilities and leave them without appropriate compensation.
Despite the ongoing battle between stakeholders, “more and more states are filing legislation for brand new deposit systems,” while states with existing programs are working hard to pass updates, said Michael Noel, public affairs director at Tomra, in a November interview. The company makes reverse vending machines and other sorting systems.
“At the end of the day, we need to make sure whatever passes works in practice — in conjunction with the beverage companies, redemption center owners, the producer responsibility organizations, everyone,” he said.
Economic and commodity trends could shape discussions
The idea that bottle bills could help boost U.S. supply chains for recycled materials is not a new argument, but it’s one that proponents have emphasized more often lately. That’s in light of the Trump administration’s interest in initiatives that reduce reliance on other countries and ramp up investment in domestic manufacturing.
“Domestic security is a big concern,” said Kate Bailey, chief policy officer of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, during a bottle bill webinar in November. APR supports deposit return systems as a way to increase recycling rates and help consumer goods companies achieve recycled content commitments.
The webinar was organized by the National Stewardship Action Council, which has worked for the last few years on efforts to establish a national bottle bill. At the same time, NSAC leads the recently-launched “ReMade in America” initiative, which urges companies to invest in domestic end markets and use recycled content recovered from U.S. sources.
“We must strengthen the U.S. end markets that ensure what we capture and process is remade into new American products,” said Heidi Sanborn, NSAC’s executive director and CEO, in a November release about the ReMade in America pledge.
Certain stakeholders, including the aluminum industry and organizations like the Can Manufacturers Institute, say container deposit systems help save energy by reusing aluminum in their manufacturing processes and help avoid importing as much raw aluminum from abroad.
Boosting domestic supply chains could also help reduce the industry’s tariff exposure. The aluminum industry prides itself on domestic recycled content use, but it still relies on imports from places like Canada. Last year, aluminum was subject to an increase in tariffs, CMI says.
Bottle bills have also long been part of the conversation around how to boost supply chains for plastics, including PET. Bailey says about 60% of the PET volume collected for recycling comes from the 10 states that have a bottle bill. “Without bottle deposits, we, frankly, would have half the recycling industry we have today for plastics,” she said.
Recent rPET reclaimer closures underscore how domestic supply chain issues can impact both recycling end markets and bottle bill systems themselves, said Susan Collins, executive director at the Container Recycling Institute, a bottle bill proponent.
PET reclaimers say they’ve been especially vulnerable to overseas imports of cheap recycled and virgin PET in the last few years. Reclaimer rPlanet Earth closed in California in September, Phoenix Technologies’ Ohio rPET closed in December, and Alpek closed its Pennsylvania PET recycling plant in January.
Various factors, including the wide spread in price between domestic virgin PET and its recycled counterparts, plus the availability of less-expensive rPET from overseas, may have contributed to the closures. California, which has a recycled content mandate, does not require this recycled content to be domestic.
Plus, “there's a ton of suspicion that the imported materials may or may not actually be recycled content. They might be virgin that's labeled as recycled content,” Collins said. “This is a huge trend that not only affects the container deposit programs in the U.S., but it also affects all of the curbside programs in the U.S., because they all need to have an outlet for that material.”
EPR could help — or hinder — bottle bill progress
Many state regulators also must face localized issues in order to design and operate their deposit return systems effectively.
One such influence could be the rise of EPR for packaging policies. Maryland lawmakers, passed an EPR for packaging law last May but failed to pass a deposit return system bill during the same session. Martha Ainsworth, chair of the Maryland Sierra Club Zero Waste Team, said at the time that some stakeholders pitted the two bills against one another in an “either/or” scenario, which she said hurt the bottle bill’s chances of success.
Lawmakers reintroduced the bottle bill again this year, and supporters hope that it has more breathing room to gain traction. Provisions in the EPR law might actually help a bottle bill pass, Ainsworth said. For example, subsidies for recycling facilities and local governments in the EPR law might help address some MRF operator concerns that a bottle bill would adversely affect business.
Washington state, which passed its EPR for packaging law that same month, has seen bottle bill legislation reintroduced. Bill sponsor Rep. Monica Stonier has characterized the bill as a way to curb plastic waste and boost state recycling rates. Washington’s current overall recycling rate is about 50%, and that rate could rise by collecting more containers that are often discarded in parks or waterways, she told local station KING 5. And such a program could help save taxpayers money by reducing the budget the state needs for cleaning up roadways and waterways, she said.
Last year, Rhode Island lawmakers introduced a bill that would have established both a 10-cent container deposit return system and an EPR for packaging law. Lawmakers ultimately overhauled the bill, replacing it with language that called for a needs assessment instead. That version became law.
Rhode Island’s legislature has not reintroduced a bottle bill so far this year, and the state is gearing up for a contested governor’s race and a busy House and Senate reelection season.
Despite that, “there’s a lot of interest in Rhode Island right now,” Tomra’s Noel said. “The underlying trends in Rhode Island are still heading towards packaging and recycling reform of some kind.”
A draft of Rhode Island’s needs assessment is due by April 1, which Noel said could offer early insight into what future EPR and bottle bill programs might look like.
“The state legislature will be well-educated on what a recycling refund program can deliver. And at the same time, they've started to evaluate EPR for packaging more thoroughly,” he said.
Save the Bay, an environmental group that was involved in a previous legislative commission recommending Rhode Island move forward with a bottle bill, says it’s likely another bottle bill will be introduced in 2026. The group is concerned about bottle-related litter and its impact on the state’s waterways.
Noel said environmental groups in the state are a major force behind bottle bill initiatives, along with groups like the Coalition for High Performance Recycling, a group of brands, environmental groups and packaging suppliers including CMI, The Recycling Partnership, The Alumium Association, Glass Packaging Institute and several aluminum packaging companies.
But a coalition of opponents from the liquor and grocery industry, led by American Beverage, were a major force in blocking the bottle bill in 2025. They are likely to come back to the table with similar concerns if a new bill gets introduced. That group sees bottle bills as a tax on consumers and argues the policy would raise the cost to do business in the state. Instead, the group called for the state to invest in curbside improvements and focus on an EPR program instead.
CRI’s Collins says this argument is a familiar one for opponents of a combined bottle bill/EPR scenario — not just in Rhode Island, but in other states expected to gear up for bottle bill legislation this year. She thinks the argument allows the beverage industry and distributors to shirk responsibility, because container deposit systems require the industry to cover the entire cost of the program, whereas some EPR programs only require a partial responsibility requirement, she said.
Collins said a combination of an EPR for packaging program and a bottle bill can help address gaps in recycling systems. That’s because EPR for packaging typically addresses materials collected at the curb, whereas bottle bills can help address containers people usually dispose of outside the home.
“Those arguments [against the bottle bill] were also used in places that are ahead of the U.S., like Canada, Australia and the EU,” she said. “Those places all came to the conclusion that the only way you're going to get really high rates of return for beverage containers is to go for a deposit return system.”
Stakeholder buy-in will still be important
Some things about the bottle bill legislation process haven’t changed over the years, and that includes the push and pull of opposing stakeholder needs, Noel and Collins said. Collins expects lawmakers and stakeholders to start better understanding the role that beverage distributors can play in the stakeholder process — and how much power they can have in the room.
While some bottle bill proponents believe they need to bend the ear of major brands like Coca-Cola to get them on board with state bottle bills, Collins says it’s the beverage distributors who pay taxes in the state, form relationships with lawmakers and businesses and have the most to gain or lose from a bill being passed.
“The tricky thing is that most of these distributors have names you’ve never heard of,” she said. If distributors don’t want to support a bill, it may not hurt their reputation, “because people aren’t familiar with them even though they have quite a lot of power.”
Another common area of opposition comes from MRF operators and haulers, who are typically skeptical of the possible impacts on their business.The National Waste & Recycling Association says most bottle bills reduce MRF revenue. Meanwhile, the Solid Waste Association of North America updated its policy position in 2024 to support certain bottle bill systems as a key way to increase collection rates.
These longtime clashes between stakeholders will continue to create roadblocks that freeze bottle bill progress, Collins said. That’s bad news for proponents attempting to introduce a new program to a state, and it also hampers existing bottle bill states with programs that were first established decades ago, Noel added.
These existing programs “have largely been neglected and have had minimal improvements,” which leads to the programs not reaching the return rates they’ve seen in the past, he said. “There's clearly some opportunity for improvement there, both on the performance and the efficiency side. And, I would add, with general marketing and position with the public,” he said.
Observers are also still looking to states like New York, which has attempted to update its bottle bill for years. Assemblymember Deborah Glick, who recently announced plans to retire, has said passing a “bigger, better bottle bill” is a major priority for her final legislative season. That bill would update New York’s bottle bill by doubling the deposit value to 10 cents and add more kinds of containers to the program, such as coffee, tea and sports drinks.
Vermont is also considering changes to its bottle bill. The state’s Agency of Natural Resources and Department of Environmental Conservation commissioned a study in the fall to lay out different scenarios for improving its system.
Though these policies can take years to pass and implement, Collins said the process of developing bills, bringing stakeholders to the table, and adjusting expectations for the changing needs of the state are all part of the process.
Bottle bills in 2026
Here’s a look at some of the container deposit return bills that are making their way through state and local legislatures, with more expected to be introduced in coming weeks. Which bills are you following, and which ones are we missing? Send us an email at waste.dive.editors@industrydive.com.
