Sean Hughes, Account Director, Connecticut Package Stores Association.

By Sean Hughes

The 2025 legislative session is now in the rearview mirror. What turned out to be a helpful and productive session started with the anxious anticipation of industry-altering legislation. Wine in grocery stores and beer in box stores are two issues that have continued to be proposed each session in an attempt by outsiders to change the industry for their benefit.

Each year, they have successfully been killed in the committee process, never advancing to either the House of Representatives or the Senate. One piece of legislation that did pass was quite helpful in addressing the bottle bill and issues that have come with the expansion in 2021.

House Bill 7288, which is the large bonding bill, had clarifying changes to the bottle bill that addresses some of the cross-border redemption as well as more information that is collected for redeemers. After the passage of H.B. 7288, redemption centers will have additional reporting on those that redeem. For individuals who redeem more than 2,500 containers, the center will now need to record the person’s name, license plate, driver’s license, the number of containers brought to the facility and the locations where the individual acquired the containers.

The goal is to monitor those who could be bad actors collecting out-of-state containers where the deposit was not originally paid. The bill also caps a person at 240 beverage containers that can be redeemed in a day. This was a change from a 240 cap for just one visit or trip to a single reverse vending machine. These changes were passed as an attempt to regulate the bad actors and separate them from those consumers who are simply returning the containers that were purchased in the state and are looking to receive their deposit back.

Another fix to the bottle bill that was helpful and included in H.B. 7288 dealt with exemptions to the bottle bill. THC-infused beverages and hard cider are now clarified to be exempt from the bottle bill and cannot be redeemed. There was some confusion this past winter and spring as to if the newly allowed THC-infused beverages were in the bottle bill. Some invoices had been received by stores that showed a bottle deposit had been charged on the containers. Connecticut’s bottle bill applies to malt beverages only when talking about alcoholic beverages.

During the debate to expand the bottle bill in 2021, there were numerous clarifying questions on the House and Senate floor that ensured that only malt beverages still applied to the bottle bill. A year later, a confusion about all hard seltzers being included in the bottle bill became an issue. The industry proved to the agency in charge of redemption oversight that only hard seltzers that were malt-based could be included. The agency relented and did not broadly label all hard seltzers to be included for redemption.

Overall, the 2025 legislative session was a successful one. No bills that sought to make massive changes to the industry were introduced, thanks to advocacy during the summer and fall with legislators. The legislation that did pass was helpful to the industry in terms of clarifying existing law and introducing further oversight on the way containers can be redeemed. Though the session may have just finished in early June, the work toward the next has already begun.

Find out more about any of these issues and the benefits of membership at ctpsa.com.