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# DC Mulls a Bottle Bill
- URL: https://bevnews.net/dc-mulls-a-bottle-bill/
- Published: 2026-10-28T04:16:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-28T04:16:21.000Z
- Author: Joel Whitaker

Bottle bills – you know, the ones that require you to pay a 5 or 10 cent "deposit" on every bottle you buy with the promise you can get the nickel or dime back if you return the empty bottle – are just so 1980s technology.

So, it shouldn't be a surprise that the Washington, D.C., city council is considering being the first "state" to adopt one since 2005--21 years ago, when George W. Bush was in his second term as President of the U.S. 

That led **Risa Hirao**, president/general counsel, **District of Columbia Association of Beverage Alcohol Wholesalers, to warn,** "Your warehouse doesn't have to be in DC for the DC bottle bill to be your major problem."

It would, she says, "require businesses and individuals that bring beverages into DC for resale to finance and operate an expensive and complex system for collecting, transporting, sorting and processing used containers. These responsibilities require significant infrastructure investment before the program operations can start in a jurisdiction that must farm out all its materials processing because it lacks recycling facilities of its own. This extraordinary burden will be shouldered not just by DC business, but by many businesses operating beyond DC’s borders."

DC's public works department collects recyclables once a week from apartments with three or fewer units as well as from single-family homes, takes them to a transer station where they are loaded into long-haul trucks and sent 24 miles north to the Waste Management (WM) [Waste Management's (WM) Recycle America Material Recovery Facility (MRF)](https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=%2Fg%2F1td59htn&ref=bevnews.net) in **Elkridge, Maryland**, where items are sorted, baled, and sold as raw commodities.

There's a better way than a 1980's style bottle bill, and New Y9rk City is doing it. The old days of separating recyclables into multiple different bins, which in some towns you then lugged to the "recycling center" at the town dump, has changed. Does recycling work in New York City? The answer is yes. [Take a loo](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4Y1P97pY9jI?ref=bevnews.net)k inside the largest recycling facility in North America.

For your own investment planning, as well as to see why 10-cents-a-bottle "bottle bills" are such a poor idea, check out this WSJ video, "[The Economics of WM](https://www.wsj.com/video/series/the-economics-of/why-investors-are-loving-garbage/3D14F9D4-98C3-4D4A-A577-04D6C6E6C814?ref=bevnews.net)." which explains why North America’s largest landfill operator, plans to invest over $2 billion in new tech, from waste-to-energy plants to recycling plants equipped with AI-powered optical sorters. 

After viewing these videos, you can see there's no reason for Washington, DC, consumers to be burdened with returning bottles to the store, nor the stores with handling returns in any way–even through a recycling machine. There's a better way, and the beverage industry should lead the DC Council to see it.

***Full disclosure:*** I do not live in Washington, D.C., nor do I have stock in any firm tin the waste management industry.