OPINION: Big Brands, Big Waste - How a Bottle Deposit Bill Can Help Them Clean Up Their Act and Keep the Anacostia Watershed Clean

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Since its inception in 1989, the Anacostia Watershed Society has worked tirelessly to remove tons of trash from the Anacostia River with the help of countless dedicated volunteers.  In addition, our advocacy efforts have led to the reduction of single-use plastics like grocery bags, straws, utensils, and Styrofoam.  In fact, our most recent trash sorting at the Nash Run Trash Trap in December 2024 recorded only 0.5% of Styrofoam (by volume) – a significant improvement.

Nevertheless, plastic waste remains a major problem. At Nash Run, about 50% of the total trash (by volume) consists of bottles and cans, with plastic bottles making up the majority. These bottles travel from our local streets to streams, the Anacostia River, the Chesapeake Bay, and ultimately the ocean.  Along the way, they will break down into microplastics which are harmful to aquatic life.  Once released into the environment, plastic bottles are very difficult, costly, and nearly impossible to clean up. The best solution is to prevent them from escaping into the environment in the first place. 

A Bottle Deposit Bill could be a game-changer in reducing plastic bottle pollution.  The bill requires consumers to pay a small deposit, usually a dime, when purchasing bottled beverages.  When the bottle is returned for recycling, the deposit is refunded. Such deposits are a powerful incentive for consumers to recycle plastic bottles rather than simply throw them away. Redemption rates (percentage of returnable single use beverage containers returned for deposit) in states that have adopted bottle bills are 70%, 80%, sometimes as high as 90%, keeping billions of plastic bottles out of our landfills, incinerators, streets, parks, and rivers!

• Producers and manufacturers shoulder the cost of the deposit/return program, taking on more responsibility for their products’ environmental impact.  
• Consumers do their part by chipping in a returnable deposit and returning bottles for recycling.  
• The environment benefits from dramatic reductions of plastic waste polluting our streets and waterways. 

At our cleanup events, we often collect plastic bottles from well-known brands like Deer Park, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola. It’s easy to feel like we’re cleaning up the mess these major companies create.  Of course, we know that those companies are not directly littering. However, those companies are designing packaging that is easily discarded in the wrong places, and the burden of cleaning up that waste falls on municipalities, government agencies, nonprofits, and volunteers. That waste is then cleaned up and brought to a landfill or an incinerator, which is ultimately funded by taxpayers.  Therefore, identifying companies whose products and packaging are easily discarded in the environment is important.  We want those companies to work with us to make our environment as clean as possible.

What Our Trash Audits Reveal

Fifteen years ago, in 2009, the Anacostia Watershed Society conducted its first Producer / Vendor survey, later renamed the Trash Audit.  We repeated the survey in 2024-2025 to analyze trends over time.

Survey Summary
Here is the summary table of the 2024 survey.

Beverage bottles were sorted into 5 categories that are shown in the table above on the left column. Labels on the bottles were carefully inspected and producers and/or vendors (brands) were recorded. “Top 10 companies identified” refers to the brands most frequently found in this survey, ranked from the most common to the 10th most common.
Some companies may have only a small number of bottles in the survey, and not all of the “top 10 companies” are necessarily major corporations. These results reflect local data, and rankings may vary in other regions. The point here is that a few large companies dominate each category, a tendency likely found in other regions.

These results indicate that several large beverage companies have a disproportionately large impact on the plastic pollution problem, while taxpayers and volunteers are often left footing the bill and supplying the labor to clean it up. One of the most important features of bottle bill legislation is that the beverage producers pay for set up and operation of the deposit/return system. State and local governments (read: taxpayers) pay nothing. In effect, bottle bills transfer the responsibility for preventing trash pollution from the taxpayer to the producers of the trash, where it belongs.

Below are details of the key findings of the AWS 2024-2025 Trash Audit

Soft Drink Bottles: Key Findings

Since the soft drinks category is highly dominated by major companies (99.1%) and the number of plastic water bottles found (547) was significant, we will provide a detailed analysis below.   All other analysis results will be shown at the end of this post.

Shown below are the detailed results for Bottled Soft Drinks.

Most bottles are from major companies such as PepsiCo and The Coca Cola Company.  The total number of bottles for the top companies is 116.  The total number of identified bottles is 117 (154-37), thus, 116/117 = 99.1% of bottles were dominated by top 10 companies. 

Plastic Water Bottles: Key Findings 

The tables below present the survey results for plastic water bottles, organized in two different ways: 

• The left table is organized by Producers or Vendors (e.g., Kirkland, 7-Eleven, Deer Park).  
• The right table is organized by bottling company (producers) when we can identify, as many private-label brands are bottled by the same bottling companies.  We color-coded those and consolidated into Producers (bottling companies) as much as possible in order to better calculate market dominance.

The total number of bottles for the top 10 companies is 316.  The total number of identified bottles is 328 (547 total collected minus 219 unknown), thus, 316/328 = 96.3% of bottles were dominated by top 10 companies. 

Niagara Bottling supplies its products to many major brands including Kirkland, 7-Eleven, BJ’s, ALDI, etc. Blue Triton Brands makes water bottles for the major brand, Deer Park. This underscores how a small number of large companies dominate the plastic water bottle industry.

Another Concern - Nips

As we conducted  the survey, we noticed that there were many nips (small, palm sized, liquor bottles) in the Bottled Liquor category.  To better understand their impact,we separated the nips and counted the numbers separately from larger bottles. The results show that about 80% of all the liquor bottles collected were nips.  Nips are small and portable, thus, easy to litter anywhere and are often too small for most trash traps to capture. Recognizing that they are an important but often overlooked item of trash, the Maryland bottle bill requires a 10-cent refundable deposit on nips.

Other Detailed Results beyond Bottled Soft Drinks and Plastic Water Bottles

2009-2010 Producer Vendor Survey / Trash Audit