Under a bill headed to Connecticut legislators this week, towns and cities could decide individually whether to ban the sale of nips, those tiny bottles of liquor that fit in pockets and are often tossed out of vehicle windows onto streets and into waterways
Tom Metzner of Glastonbury, who is spearheading a citizen movement in favor of the bill for local control over the nips, said the bill amounts to clarifying Connecticut’s liquor law and doesn’t seek to ban nips statewide.
Metzner, an environmental activist who personally favors a ban in Glastonbury, said the bill would simply give communities a “voice.”
The bill is proposed by state Rep. Joseph Gresko, D-Stratford, House chairman of the Environment Committee, and co-sponsored by two colleagues, David Michel, D-Stamford and Representative Mary Mushinsky, D-Wallingford.
The issue will get its first airing Wednesday at a public hearing before the Environment Committee at 10 a.m.
Gresko has said every municipality has the issue with litter where nips are concerned and there’s currently no system for preventing that.
While it might sound non-controversial to tweak and clarify the regulations, the powerful state liquor industry is giving heavy pushback.
Larry Cafero, executive director and general counsel for Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of Connecticut has said he believes the regulations in Connecticut were intended to be uniform, especially because the regulations involve an intoxicant.
He has said the measure could be a “slippery slope,” that leads to the ability to ban other sized bottles or maybe even alcohols that teenagers favor.
He also said liquor store owners have an expectation when they start in the business and that includes the ability to sell nip bottles. In some cases, members of the public have praised the nip bottles as an aid to withdraw from alcohol.
It doesn’t appear large cities such as Hartford, New Haven or Bridgeport would favor a ban because there’s a built-in money incentive to sell nips.
The bottles selling for about $1 to $5 cannot be redeemed for a deposit because there is no place for them in the machinery where other other cans and bottles are redeemed.
Instead, legislators put a five cent surcharge on each nip bottle that goes back to each municipality.
Two years after the program began, Connecticut cities and towns have received nearly $9 million from the surcharge. About 90 million nips bottles per year are sold in Connecticut.
Under the law, municipalities are required to spend the money on litter reduction or environmental initiatives, but not necessarily tied to getting rid of nip bottle litter.
Metzner and fellow environmentalist Cynthia Chesky have been picking up littered nip bottles and started a Facebook page on the issue called CT Towns Nixing the “Nip”.
The alcohol in the nip bottles is typically used close to the place of purchase and tossed out the window nearby.
Partnering with advocates who favor municipal choice is the Connecticut River Conservancy, whose mission is to have a healthy and clean Connecticut River watershed, which includes other states where the river runs, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts.
Rhea Drozdenko, river steward for the CRC, said Connecticut is the state with the highest number of nips bottles found in the river.
She said during this year’s Source to Sea annual clean up, nips bottles were the “main source of trash.” They found 1,000 nip bottles in one day during a multi-state cleanup of the river, Drozdenko said.
Advocates of changing the law compare municipal choice in whether to ban nip bottles to municipalities being allowed to choose whether to allow the sale of recreational marijuana. Or compared it to the local choice about plastic grocery bags before the state banned them.
Some other states have won having the choice, including Massachusetts.
Metzner, who collects trashed nips bottles on a connector leading to Glastonbury High School, works for the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, and is taking this on a private citizen.
