Join Plastic Free Mass for Bottle Bill Lobby Day – Tomorrow 10 AM, April 2nd
- Please call your two legislators and set up meetings with them at the State House on April 2nd. Even if you do not have a meeting set up, please attend! We will be dropping literature off at legislators’ offices, and we need your help!
- Please be at the Grand Staircase at 10 AM on April 2nd in a royal blue shirt for a group picture and to collect printed materials.
- Please ask your legislators to support the modernized Bottle Bill and for them to ask leadership to support the bill (learn more at the trainings).
Need more info? Please join us today for Lobby Training
- Meeting with legislators can be intimidating. Please join us for one of the lobby training/ Q& A session TODAY April Fool’s Day.
i. One at 4PM EST Click here to join the meeting
ii. A second at 7 PM EST Click here to join the meeting
Why we want to modernize Massachusetts’ Bottle Bill:
Right now, beer and soda are the only beverages included in Massachusetts’ deposit return system. But we can do much better.
We want almost all glass, plastic, and aluminum beverage containers, from nips to 3 liters, to be part of the Bottle Bill. We want the deposit to go up from 5 cents to 10 cents, and if return levels aren’t high enough in the future, it should go up again. We want the system to be convenient, so we need to be able to bring beverage containers to any store that sells bottled and canned drinks. Finally, we want to get rid of plastic, which means transitioning from single use plastic bottles to reusable glass bottles and a regional beverage refill system.
A coalition of Mass environmental groups – Plastic Free Mass – is working to get the Bottle Bill across the finish line. We’ve adopted a list of essential principles for a modern Bottle Bill that we’d support, here.
Why do we want these things?
- We are tired of paying for the disposal and curbside recycling of beverage containers. The producers should be required to pay a handling fee that pays for bottles and cans to be recycled and refilled.
- We are tired of picking up litter and paying taxes for our cities and towns to pick up litter. Modernizing the Bottle Bill would significantly reduce the amount of beverage container and non-beverage container litter in the Commonwealth.
- Modernizing the Bottle Bill would help fight climate change. Modernizing the Bottle Bill would reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of taking 39,800 cars off the road for a year, or powering over 40,300 Massachusetts households for a year – and it won’t cost taxpayers a cent!
- Modernizing the Bottle Bill would mean that glass and plastic bottles would actually be recycled. Right now, glass bottles are ground up and used to build roads and landfill cover and plastic bottles are downcycled into textiles, not made into bottles.
Friends of the Malden River 
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