AWS Supports Bottle Bill legislation in Maryland and DC. In DC, it’s called the Recycling Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act of 2025 and in Maryland it’s called the Maryland Beverage Container Recycling Refund and Litter Reduction Program.
Every year, 5.5 billion single use beverage containers are sold in Maryland. That is an average of over 14 million plastic bottles, aluminum cans and glass bottles purchased, used, and disposed of every day! However, despite curbside pick-up, less than a quarter of all that trash is actually captured for recycling. The rest, 4 billion containers, never get into the recycling stream. That is almost 2 bottles and cans per each of Maryland’s 6.2 million residents per day, every day, going to rapidly filling, often leaking landfills, to incinerators to be burned into toxic air pollution, or into our neighborhood streets, parks, and rivers. We have all seen the result: the streams and wetlands of the Anacostia clogged with plastic trash, fouling habitat for wildlife and fish and polluting our shorelines and parks.
The District of Columbia faces similar challenges. Today, more than 75% of the bottles and cans sold in the District are not recycled. They wind up buried in landfills, burned in incinerators, or dumped in our parks, neighborhoods and waterways. The Environmental Protection Agency designated the Anacostia River as “impaired by trash,” with plastic bottles alone amounting to 60% by weight of all the trash captured in trash traps and picked up in river clean-ups. Studies show that bottle bill states cut the amount of beverage container litter by between 69% to 84%, with the highest litter reduction rates in states with a ten-cent deposit. As shown in Figure 1, the District bottle bill will increase recycling rates by 3 more than three times to 85% and cut “wasted” containers by five times. Bottle Bill legislation passed in both DC and Maryland would at a stroke cut the total amount of trash going into the river every year by half.
Bottle Bills in Maryland and DC would establish a 10-15 cent deposit on single use plastic, aluminum and glass beverage containers, which would be returned when the containers are brought back to the store or a collection center. This system powerfully incentivizes recycling, as seen in the 10 U.S. states that have bottle bills, where recycling rates are 60%, 70%, even over 80%. Imagine how many plastic bottles and aluminum cans would be kept out of our rivers and streams with that much improvement in Maryland and the District’s unacceptably low 25% recycling rate.
The proven benefits of deposit/return systems like the Maryland Bottle Bill include:
- Dramatically increased beverage container recycling rates. The estimated recycling rate, currently only 25% of containers sold in the state, would increase to more than 90% with the Bottle Bills.
- Reduced beverage container litter and plastic pollution and an increase in water quality. The system would capture billions additional beverage containers annually, including over 2.3 billion plastic bottles, keeping that trash out of our neighborhoods, streets, parks, and rivers.
- Reduced greenhouse gas emissions. By reducing the production of new cans and bottles from virgin materials, the additional recycling from this program would eliminate 231,707 metric tons of CO2 annually, the equivalent of removing the emissions of 50,371 cars.
- Savings for taxpayers and local governments. The Bottle Bills would require beverage producers to finance the costs of collection, processing, and recycling of beverage containers, diverting those materials from landfills and incinerators and saving costs for taxpayers and local governments.
- New job opportunities in collection, redemption, hauling, and processing recyclable material. In fact, recycling generated by a deposit program creates five times more jobs than landfilling or incineration.
