‘Nips’ a boost for cleanup efforts in CT
In the Park City, the money is being used to care for trees, while in the Elm City, officials say some of it will be used to clean-up parks.
In seaside New London, dozens of new trash bins were purchased and placed around the downtown while inland, in Torrington, the city found a new way to offset the salary of its recycling coordinator, while developing new recycling and clean-up programs.
Meanwhile in Hartford, officials found a way to fund a program that pays formerly-incarcer
ated residents to pick up litter and clean vital commercial corridors around the capital city.
Across Connecticut, the sale of more than 84 million miniature liquor bottles — more commonly known as “nips” — generated $4.2 million in additional revenue for cities and towns to spend on environmental and litterremoval efforts over the last year, the first in which the state began charging a fivecent surcharge on the tiny bottles.
Lawmakers first approved the surcharge in 2021, as part of a broader expansion of the state’s decade-old bottle return program, which critics had long argued failed to do anything about the millions of nips sold and discarded in streets, parks, and rivers every year.
Frustration with the pollution issue has led a number of New England communities to consider banning the sale of nips altogether.
“It’s a culture of concealment,” said Larry Cafero, the executive director of the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of Connecticut. “They drink it, and they chuck it.”
While some environmentalists in Connecticut sought to fully incorporate nips into the state’s bottle deposit program, lawmakers argued that the reverse vending machines used to collect bottles are not designed to handle the 50ml nips. Cafero’s group helped forge an agreement by which the wholesalers would collect the five-cent fee on every bottle, and return the money to the towns where the bottles were sold to fund cleanup efforts.
The resulting law gave several suggestions for how towns spend the money — such as hiring a recycling coordinator, installing storm drain filters or purchasing street sweepers — but otherwise gave local officials discretion to use the funds within the parameters of “environmental measures intended to reduce the generation of solid waste in such municipality or reduce the impact of litter caused by such solid waste.”
In October, data released by the wholesalers and the Department of Consumer Protection revealed just how many nips had been sold in the program’s first year, and how much money was returned to each of the state’s 169 municipalities.
In that year, there were 24 cities and towns that sold over a million of the miniature bottles, led by New Haven, where more than 3.8 million were sold, netting the Elm City $190,617.
While the city has yet to spend the money, a spokesman for Mayor Justin Elicker said the plan is to use the revenue to supplement its street sweeping efforts, promote a city-wide recycling program and pay for cleanup activities in parks and other public spaces.
The funds distributed to cities ranged from enough to hire one or more full-time employees — such as a deputy tree warden in Bridgeport — to just a few hundred dollars in towns like Woodbridge and Weston.
Seven towns reported zero sales of nips bottles, and thus did not receive any money from surcharges.
Vernon, which saw relatively modest 884,701 of the tiny bottles sold, announced in July that it would use its money to partner with local non-profits groups that provide vocational training to disabled residents, who would in turn conduct litter patrols around town.
Nearby in the much larger city of Hartford, officials planned to put the money toward a similar use as a more permanent funding source for the city’s Neighborhood Ambassador program. The program, which provides part-time work for formerly-incarcerated individuals to pick up trash, remove weeds and scrub graffiti, was originally funded through one-tim eA merican Rescue Plan Act funds, according to Akash Kaza, a spokesman for Mayor Luke Bronin.
New London Mayor Michael Passero said the city council had approved spending the city’s $62,212 to partially fund the purchase of 43 new trash bins downtown, including more than a dozen solar-powered compactors that can hold up to 150 gallons of waste.
In Bridgeport, sustainability manager Chadwick Schroeder said that the city’s deputy tree warden will help oversee the “day-to-day maintenance of Bridgeport’s canopy,” and that additional funds from the Park City’s $135,564 in returns on nips sales will also go toward various litter control projects in high-visibility areas of the city.
“Litter control and trees go hand in hand in creating significant quality of life benefits,” Schroeder said in a statement. “Connecting clean neighborhoods with environmentally healthy and sound practices is how we create sustainable and climate resilient neighborhoods, and neighborhoods where residents can look around and see a tangible difference.”
Officials in other towns, including Hamden and Norwalk, said Friday that they were still developing plans for how to use the bulk of the money that they have received.
“We are looking forward to enhancing some of our existing neighborhood improvement projects, such as our public art, graffiti remediation, and streetscape improvement projects by adding additional funds from the Nickel for Nips program,” said Michelle Woods Matthews, a spokeswoman for Norwalk Mayor Harry Rilling.
Towns are not required to spend the money in the same year they receive it, and some may choose to save the funding until they have enough to spend on bigger projects, according to state Rep. Joe Gresko, DStratford, who co-chairs the Environment Committee.
For example, in his hometown of Stratford, Gresko said that officials have been mulling using the funds to purchase a second pumpout boat that can remove effluent and waste from other boats, rather than having them dump offshore in Long Island Sound or the Housatonic River.
Gresko added that he was “flabbergasted” by the final numbers showing the state’s largest cities selling upwards of2 million of the tiny bottles.
“I knew it was a lot but I didn’t know it was that many,” Gresko said.
Cafero said that the fivecent surcharge did not appear to have any impact on the number of bottles sold in Connecticut, and that the number could even be higher in future years because many retailers stocked up on shipments from wholesalers before nickels were added to the cost of of nips last year.