CT Bottle Redemption Debate: What's Happening in 2026

Connecticut’s 10-cent bottle deposit took effect on January 1, 2024, and by the close of 2025 the redemption rate had hit 97%. Sounds like a policy success. Retailers and distributors don’t see it that way.

Now some members of the General Assembly are asking hard questions about whether the program, as currently structured, is working for anyone beyond consumers returning bottles for cash.

How Connecticut Got Here

Connecticut’s bottle bill goes back to 1978. The state wasn’t first. Oregon launched the original container deposit program in 1971, setting its rate at 5 cents. Connecticut followed at the same nickel deposit, and that number didn’t move for decades.

Stagnation caught up with the program by 2020. Redemption rates had dropped below 50%, a meaningful fall from where they’d been earlier that decade. Lawmakers studied what Oregon had done: that state raised its deposit to 10 cents in 2017 and saw return rates climb by more than 15 percentage points over the years that followed. Connecticut’s General Assembly voted in 2021 to do the same thing, scheduling the increase to 10 cents for January 1, 2024.

What happened next looked impressive. Redemption climbed from 50% at the end of 2023 all the way to 97% by the end of 2025. That’s a 47-point swing in two years. Lawmakers celebrated. Then the complaints started coming in.

The Problem With 97%

That number is where the trouble begins, not where it ends.

Distributors are reporting return volumes in certain parts of Connecticut that can’t be explained by normal consumer behavior. We’re not talking about high return rates. We’re talking about more bottles coming back than distributors can account for having sold. The only math that makes that work is if someone’s hauling empties in from out of state and cashing them in here, because Connecticut’s deposit is now the highest in the region.

The system is designed as a closed financial loop. A retailer buys product from a distributor, charges customers 10 cents per container at the register, and then reimburses those customers when the bottles come back. Retailers recover that money from distributors. The model is self-sustaining when all the containers in circulation were actually sold in Connecticut. It isn’t self-sustaining when out-of-state bottles, on which Connecticut distributors collected no deposit, are being fed into that same loop and paid out at 10 cents apiece.

Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection tracks the program, and the 97% figure comes from their data. The agency isn’t disputing the number. The dispute is over what it actually represents.

Worth noting: the original 5-cent deposit from 1978, had it simply tracked the Consumer Price Index’s inflation calculator, would be worth roughly 25 cents today. Connecticut residents pulled $42 million in redemptions in 2023 alone. There’s no shortage of financial incentive driving this behavior, wherever the bottles are coming from.

The CT Mirror reported in April that distributors are pressing the General Assembly for relief, arguing the current structure leaves them covering costs they never agreed to absorb.

What Legislators Are Weighing

Options on the table aren’t clean. Each one trades one problem for another.

If Connecticut cuts the deposit back, it’s hard to imagine redemption rates staying anywhere near 97%. The state saw what a nickel deposit did over time. Litter returns. The environmental case for the program dissolves.

If lawmakers don’t act, distributors keep absorbing losses on bottles they didn’t sell. Some have said privately that the situation isn’t sustainable through another full year, let alone into 2026 and beyond.

A third path involves tighter verification, requiring some form of proof that a container was sold in Connecticut before it can be redeemed here. Several states with deposit programs have wrestled with exactly this problem. None has found an easy fix. Barcode tracking and point-of-sale verification add cost and complexity, and retailers, who are already unhappy, won’t welcome more administrative burden.

“The question isn’t whether 97% is a good number,” one industry official told Connecticut Navigator. “It’s whether the number is real.”

That’s the question the General Assembly has to answer before the current session ends. The January 2024 deposit increase took years of political work to pass. Unwinding any part of it, even for legitimate reasons, won’t be quick or quiet.