Legislation known as the “bottle bill” recently inched a bit closer to passage when it came out of one D.C. Council committee and into another. Now, it remains to be seen when the latter committee will conduct another hearing for the polarizing legislation.
In the meantime, Ward 8 resident and environmentalist Vondre Walston counts among those spreading the word about the bill he said will not only clean the streets he cares about, but put a few dollars in the pockets of those who need it the most.
“I got a lot of people that are residents that live in my neighborhood who’ve seen and heard and saw me pushing for this. They’ve been collecting since last year,” said Walston, an outreach coordinator for Ward 8 Woods Conservancy.
Earlier this year, Walston spoke in support of the Recycling Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act of 2025 — a bill that D.C. Councilmember Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1) introduced with 10 of her council colleagues. If passed, this legislation would levy a 10-cent fee on beverages that goes back into consumers’ pockets each time they drop off empty bottles at stores and redemption centers.
For three years, Walston and other members of the Return, Refund, and Recycle Coalition for DC (3RC for DC) have organized around the Recycling Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act. This campaign grew amid efforts by Ward 8 Woods members and other coalition members to beautify several miles of woodland located east of the Anacostia River.
As Walston pointed out, that undertaking has often involved removing several hundred pounds of empty bottles and other debris that ends up in the District’s waterways.
“We have first-hand experience with 60% of the bottles that end up in places like the landfills, or in this river here, or in areas where there used to be rivers and small lakes,” Walston said earlier this month during an Anacostia River boat tour conducted by the Anacostia Watershed Society. “The water recedes and there’s nothing but a small landfill or a small seed of hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles, glass bottles, beer bottles that aren’t created anymore. We’ve seen it all.”
Walston said he joined the movement eager to encourage more Ward 8 residents to take ownership of their communities, especially as Ward 8 Woods expands its volunteer-based operations to portions of Wards 5 and 7, along with Prince George’s County, Maryland.
“This could turn into a full-time job for somebody,” Walston said. “Somebody could collect bottles for $8 a day and make a good living, depending on their methods. … You can fill your car three, four times in a day, and that’s $200 a day, depending on how many bottles you collect.”
A Legislative Journey and the Fight Around Messaging
The Recycling, Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act mandates bottle distributors — like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and BlueTriton — to establish an environmental stewardship organization.
Those organizations would collaborate with the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment in the creation of redemption centers throughout the District that facilitate the collection of used bottles. In addition, the bottle distributors would pay handling fees to grocery stores and other entities that would also be responsible for collecting and storing bottles that consumers return.
In 1987, a ballot measure in favor of a container deposit-return system failed by a 10-point margin, due in part to a corporate-funded opposition campaign. Decades later, Nadeau said she’s facing similar opposition as she aims to secure the passage of a bill that makes sense.
“It’s very basic if you think of it that way,” she said. “Should big companies have to pay for their impact? I think so. So that’s how we’re going to try to stay focused as we get to the end of the process here.”
In recent decades, bottle bills have caught traction across the U.S. Today, nearly a dozen states — including California, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Oregon — have laws to establish redemption centers, and levy refundable deposits and handling fees.
Some of those jurisdictions report bottle return rates of higher than 80% and at least a 40% increase in recycling.
States that have been less successful — including Massachusetts and Connecticut — have explored the expansion of bottle eligibility, while some opted to increase their bottle deposit value from 5 cents to 10 cents.
For Nadeau, the benefits of the D.C. bottle bill far outweigh the labor and resources expended by the corporate bottle distributors. In any other scenario, she said, the bottles end up on D.C. streets, and eventually in the Anacostia River.
“In the systems that we have … with commingled recycling, everything gets so contaminated that it doesn’t really ever get reused,” Nadeau said. “Most of our recycling ends up getting down-cycled into landfills or incinerators and that’s not what we want here in the District of Columbia. I think it’s actually pretty offensive to people who’ve done their due diligence to separate all of their recyclables and put them in the container and wash them out.”
The Alliance for an Affordable D.C., a coalition of 500 businesses and residents standing in opposition to the D.C. bottle bill, responded to an Informer inquiry in support of the beverage and food industry, saying that Nadeau’s bill would further burden local businesses operating in a stressful economic environment.
“It … adds a 10-cent deposit at the cash register on every container sold unless you return it to a redemption center,” the Alliance said in a statement. “There is no guarantee that residents will get the 10-cent fee back if they aren’t able to easily redeem them or just choose to dispose of them in the residential recycling ‘blue bins’ as happens now.”
The Alliance also expressed concerns about what would happen with D.C. taking on this endeavor alone in the Mid-Atlantic region.
“This bill would make D.C. an outlier surrounded by larger states with no bottle deposit laws, leaving it open to fraud, which would cost the program immense amounts of money,” the Alliance said. “With no way to designate where a bottle was purchased and Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia having no bottle/can deposit program, it will make it likely that millions of empty containers will end up being redeemed in D.C., even though no deposit was ever paid.”
On Oct. 1, the D.C. Council’s Committee on Business and Economic Development, chaired by D.C. Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie (I-At large), conducted a public hearing about the Recycling Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act. Some of the more than 200 public witnesses who spoke in support of the legislation represented Girl Scout Troop 42139, the D.C. chapter of the Sierra Club, and Friends of Kingman & Heritage Islands.
McDuffie would later release a statement encouraging stakeholder engagement and careful review of what he described as consequential legislation. As outlined in a Nov. 12 memo, McDuffie’s qualms center on increased costs for bottle distributors and restaurants, reduced regional competitiveness, inequitable access to redemption centers in eastern parts of the District, and the lack of similar legislation in Maryland and Virginia.
“The goal of a cleaner, greener District is one I fully support,” McDuffie said. “But we must balance environmental progress with economic realities and equity for all residents. Before we create new costs for consumers or small businesses, we should explore proven strategies like expanding curbside recycling and public education programs that have already demonstrated measurable success.”
The bill had an opponent in Shawn Townsend of the D.C. Restaurant Association, who sought an alternative approach. During the hearing, he expressed concerns about the legislation’s potential to discourage businesses and distributor activity in the District. He also raised the issue of restaurants’ capacity for bottle storage, and the costs they would incur for transporting bottles to redemption centers.
“Rather than creating a costly parallel infrastructure, we encourage the committee to consider strengthening existing recycling systems through improved curbside collection and education, expanded access to recycling bins in public spaces and commercial corridors, and enhanced sorting technology at processing facilities,” Townsend said on Oct. 1. “We also recommend working with Maryland and Virginia on regional approaches to environmental policies rather than implementing an isolated system. Finally, resources would be better invested in helping local businesses adopt sustainable practices through incentives rather than imposing compliance costs.”
Ryan Nicholas, legislative director in the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, expressed similar concerns about businesses moving out of the District to other jurisdictions.
“Introducing a new regulatory process, as envisioned in this legislation, risks tipping the scale against our businesses,” Nicholas said on Oct. 1. “This risk is amplified without regional counterparts taking similar actions. … Businesses have spoken loud and clear that administrative burdens are making it more difficult to operate and that adding new ones can be life-or-death.”
The D.C. bottle bill has since moved on — unscathed — to the council’s Committee on Transportation and the Environment, where D.C. Councilmember Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) will likely conduct a hearing.
The council member’s office told The Informer that a date has yet to be determined.
Meanwhile, Nadeau continues to engage her council colleagues and local businesses about the legislation. She’s also railing against what she calls myths perpetuated by corporate bottle distributors.
“There has never been proof that a bottle bill raises prices anywhere that bottle bills exist,” Nadeau said. “Small stores are exempted from the requirement to take back beverage containers. That really takes…the impact on small businesses completely off the table. Restaurants don’t have to collect containers and smaller bottlers like our awesome breweries here in D.C. don’t have to pay that handling fee that the other distributors pay.”
A Concept That’s Persisted Across Generations
The 3RC for DC coalition, dedicated to the passage of a local container deposit-return law, has 32 member organizations, including: Anacostia Riverkeeper, Anacostia Watershed Society, Beautify D.C., Friends of Kingman & Heritage Islands, Sierra Club, Ward 8 Woods, and Zero Waste Coalition.
They also have believers in Garvey Bridgers and Haakim Brown Bey, students at The School of Harvest, a Ward 7 Montessori school where the youngsters have conducted weekly park cleanups.
Garvey and Haakim unsuccessfully attempted to speak before the council’s Committee on Business and Economic Development during the bottle bill hearing. Weeks later, while on the banks of the Anacostia River, where bottles and other debris floated along the shoreline, they reflected on the legislation.
“I see trash like literally everywhere,” Garvey said. “The litter has affected our water, our parks, and where we play. The litter has affected our environment because it’s unsanitary and unsafe. The cleaner streets and parks [are], young people like me can have more fun.”
Haakim spoke briefly about the toil of cleaning parks and wooded areas, saying that a container deposit-return law prevents trash from accumulating at speeds faster than what he and his friends can manage.
“The bottle bill … is the good that it can do for different people, not just east of the [Anacostia] river, but the general area of D.C.,” Haakim said. “Trash build-up can sometimes be a bit too much for us to stop once it goes into a place that is a bit too far or a bit too high for us to combat the problem.”
Lora Nunn, a native Washingtonian and 3RC for DC coalition co-lead, called the passage of the Recycling, Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act a matter of social justice. In making her case, she spoke about youth’s need for clean spaces and employment opportunities.
She then reflected on aspects of her upbringing, and that of her elders, that young people today are not experiencing.
“If you talk to the seniors in the community, they remember fondly being children, collecting bottles, returning them for the deposit so they could have a little bit of spending money for candy,” said Nunn, vice president of Friends of Heritage & Kingman Islands. “When I was younger, there were a lot more opportunities for children to earn a little bit of cash. You could babysit, you could deliver papers, [but] a lot of those opportunities aren’t available to youth today.”
Ward 8 resident and 3RC for DC coalition member Damien Bascom shared similar experiences he’s had with his late grandfather.
“We would cash in the bottles and then we would go to my favorite store to buy something to eat,” said Bascom of the Zero Waste Coalition and Beautify D.C. “Then we would go buy a toy. It was just an exciting experience and memories that will last with me forever.”
Years later, Bascom, who runs a trash collection business, has turned tradition into purpose that pays. As the Recycling Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act navigates the legislative process, he’s pressing for deeper exploration of how the legislation could further foster connections that generate income for residents.
“This is a multi-stakeholder cooperative vision … and it’s a raising conversation across D.C.,” Bascom said. “We’re creating sustainability with nonprofits, workers, with government support, with ownership processing, and profits we share collectively. “