Councilmember Brianne K. Nadeau delivered the following remarks during a Committee on Business and Economic Development hearing on the Recycling Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act of 2025 (the “bottle bill”).

Thank you, Councilmember McDuffie, for holding a hearing on this important bill, which I introduced in January. I’ve spent my whole life caring about environment. 

Couldn’t be prouder to have introduced this bill to protect our environment for our kids and their kids. Thanks to everyone testifying – those in support, and those with constructive feedback. I want to acknowledge all those who met with me to help craft this legislation, including local distributers and retailers as well as residents, advocates and students.  

The Problem

DC has a significant litter issue. 

Of particular concern are beverage containers, which end up on the ground, on the street, in our neighborhoods, and in our waterways by the ton.

Plastic bottles alone account for 60% of the weight of all trash retrieved from the Anacostia River.  

They make our streets less appealing, harm fish and other wildlife, and impact the Chesapeake Bay, one of the most productive estuaries in the world – with over 3,600 species of animals and plants.

617 million beverage bottles and cans per year are sold in the District! And they are not all making it into recycling bins. There are millions and millions of bottles and cans ending up as litter in our neighborhoods.

And when beverage containers do make it into the current recycling stream, they are still not guaranteed to be recycled. A high percentage of those end up in the incinerator, primarily because recycling centers routinely reject deliveries because the material is contaminated. 

The promise that was made to my generation years ago — that if we dutifully put our recycling into the bin it would not end up in landfills is a lie. The majority of it is not being recycled.  

The Solution

There is a solution – a beverage container deposit return program. It’s been implemented in 10 states and it has been highly and measurably successful in every one of them.  

It’s also something we used to have a version of here in the District, that native and long-time residents remember fondly. I believe it’s time to bring it back. 

This is why I introduced The Recycling Refund and Litter Reduction Amendment Act of 2025, along with ten of my colleagues.  

It’s quite simple:

Retailers collect a 10-cent deposit from consumers on every beverage container – excluding dairy, infant formula, or medications. Customers return their containers and get their 10-cent deposit back.

They can take their containers to a reverse vending machine, at a grocery store for example.  

Or they can take them to a redemption center. 

The program, which would be managed by a nonprofit funded and operated by beverage distributors, would be overseen and enforced by the Department of Energy and the Environment. 

There are so, so many benefits to implementing a deposit return program here in the District.   

It will help us clean our rivers and address our litter problem, and it’s very effective:  

Studies show that states with deposit return laws have reduced container litter by up to 84%.  

The District’s bottle bill is projected to increase recycling rates by more than three times and cut the number of containers that end up in the incinerator, landfill, or the environment by five times. 

Bottle bills also put money back into our local communities, providing opportunities for people to earn money by collecting bottles. And it creates other employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. 

And this legislation promotes environmental justice. It will reduce the disproportionate amount of litter ending up in wards 5, 7, and 8, along the Anacostia River. 

Finally, notably, bottle bills put the onus of addressing the problem on the big beverage companies causing it, rather than taxpayers. 

I do want to take a minute to proactively address some of the inaccuracies we’re likely to hear from the American Beverage Association today, which come straight from their lobbying playbook. 

• There are many factors that influence the price of a beverage. The industry has never been able to prove that a bottle bill is one of them in any of the places that have them.  

• We’ve heard and will hear today concerns from small businesses. We had a lot of conversations with small businesses and made changes to the proposal to ensure they are not harmed. 

• Small stores are exempted from the requirement to take back beverage containers. And small bottlers – such as our small breweries here in D.C. – will not have to pay the handling fee that larger distributors will be responsible for. A company that distributes 1 million bottles might end up paying $500 to $2,000 total for their share of recovering their 1 million bottles. 

If this bill passes, D.C. would be the first new state with a bottle bill in over 20 years. 

A bottle deposit program will have a profound impact on the environment and on the quality of life in our city and will get us one giant step closer to meeting our zero waste goals.