Missed Tackle Led to Endless Study But Little Action on Rhode Island’s Plastic Pollution Problem
July 10, 2025
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Seven years ago, on July 16, 2018 during “Beach Office Hours” at Scarborough State Beach in Narragansett, then-Gov. Gina Raimondo announced the creation of a “Task Force to Tackle Plastics.” The initiative proved to be a template for delay.
The executive order that created the 22-member monstrosity was purportedly designed to “reduce reliance on single-use plastics that often end up in Rhode Island’s waters.” The effort supposedly targeted single-use disposables, mostly notably shopping bags, bottles, cups, straws, and balloons. The Raimondo EO failed to mention nips, and, with the exception of bags, single-use plastics continue to proliferate.
“Since I’ve been Governor, we’ve taken tremendous steps to protect our environment and preserve our state’s natural beauty,” Raimondo bragged, some would argue lied, in the press release that announced the task force. “I believe that if we work together, we can end our reliance on single-use plastics and ensure a greener future for our kids.”
Rhode Island didn’t take tremendous steps in environmental protections during her six years as governor. We also haven’t taken any since she left early for D.C. Her task force did little to nothing to reduce the state’s dependence on cheap plastics. The state’s future isn’t greener.
The Task Force to Tackle Plastics accomplished zilch because special interests and shortsighted lawmakers won’t allow us to give up petroleum-based disposables, no matter the public health and environmental costs.
It took 10 years for Rhode Island to ban plastic retail bags, and much of that effort began long before the Task Force to Tackle Plastics rose from the plastic-infested sands of Scarborough Beach.
It’s going to take at least 18 more months for Rhode Island to adopt a bottle bill. It’s already been decades. Special interests and shortsighted lawmakers are again to blame.
At the end of this year’s General Assembly session House Speaker Joe Shekarchi and Senate President Valerie Lawson decided this neophyte idea, at least to them, needed further study. Special interests don’t favor producer responsibility, so neither do lawmakers.
Connecticut has had a bottle bill for the past 45 years and Massachusetts implemented one in 1983. Shekarchi and Lawson may want to study how Rhode Island’s two closest neighbors have managed to endure. They may also want to read a 2020 report from Keep America Beautiful that estimated states without bottle bill programs have more litter per capita than states with bottle bills by a 2-to-1 ratio.
Recent research has found that bottles and cans make up 22% of littered items, as compared to an average of 8.7% in states with bottle bills, according to Neil Rhein, founder of Keep Massachusetts Beautiful. He noted a comparison of larger coastal debris surveys from 28 states found there were 38% fewer beverage containers in the coastal litter of bottle bill states versus those without bottle bills.
“There is still a great deal of conflicting data as to the implementation of best practices to address the problems of improving and disposing of our recyclable products, as well as enhancing our anti-littering efforts,” Shekarchi and Lawson claimed in a joint statement released last month. “We believe it would be in the best interests of Rhode Islanders to conduct a needs assessment.”
The need is obvious. The Ocean State is littered with microplastics, chunks of plastic, bits of plastic, plastic wrappers, plastic water bottles, tiny plastic alcohol containers, plastic milk cartons, plastic bottle caps, plastic straws, and plastic cups.
A 2023 study by the University of Rhode Island estimated the top 2 inches of Narragansett Bay’s bottom contains more than 1,000 tons of microplastics.
What did the Ocean State do? The same thing it always does: assembled a group of mostly the same people to study the problem. Most solutions are then held for further study. The few that become law are typically ignored.
The same year URI provided a picture of the bay’s seafloor (the above photo is not of Narragansett Bay, at least not presently), the General Assembly created a study commission, with a ridiculous name, to examine the recycling of plastic, glass, and aluminum. I guess then-Statehouse leadership didn’t think the 22 members of the Task Force to Tackle Plastics, which released it final report four years earlier, knew the difference between a plastic bottle and an aluminum can.
The 2023 commission, which, like it predecessor, included members of the beverage industry, met 13 times over a year and a half. It’s final report, released in April, recommended that lawmakers pass a joint bottle bill/extended producer responsibility program or pass one of the programs on its own.
Less than three months after that report was released, the Statehouse’s current crop of study group enthusiasts decided the issue needed to be examined again. This is what passes for leadership in Rhode Island.
The members of the “Special Joint Legislative Commission to Study and Provide Recommendations to Protect our Environment and Natural Resources from Plastic Bottle Waste” spent 18 months studying the problem, holding meetings, and reviewing hundreds of pieces of testimony, evidence, and presentations all so we could do it all over again two years later. Statehouse leadership loves to waste people’s time.
Now, the creation of yet another study commission awaits. Three final reports in less than a decade about the same problem. I’m so dizzy, I’m think I’m going to vomit.
I can only assume Rhode Island leadership is waiting for a report that recommends doing nothing, or covering ourselves in bubble wrap to protect us from all this spinning.
The 2024 Rhode Island Coastal Cleanup Report issued by Save The Bay reported that volunteers collected 21,662 pounds of trash from the state’s coastline, which overwhelming included single-use plastics.
The 30-page Task Force to Tackle Plastics report mentioned extended producer responsibility for plastic packaging and a bottle bill as possible solutions to all this pollution. It also mentioned a “connect-the-cap” bill that would require bottle caps remain connected to bottles. WTF? How would that help and how would it be enforced by a state that failed to see a 550-foot-long seawall made of boulders being illegally built? I’m guessing an industry representative came up with that one. Probably the same American Chemistry Council lobbyist who told Raimondo’s task force we should wrap bananas in plastic.
The 2019 report’s executive summary begins:
“Plastic pollution is dangerous to the health of our oceans and ocean species, contributes to climate change, and is a major component of unsightly litter both on our lands and in our waters.”
Yet, in the six years since, all we have managed to do is repeatedly study the problem. Nothing has substantially changed. With all this studying, you would think we’d be a helluva lot smarter.
Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.
Here here, frank
Thank you, Frank. I feel like I could vomit too. I am so tired of bills “held for further study”. Perhaps our RI legislators should be required to go to the beaches and pick up the plastic themselves. Or perhaps our RI legislators should be required to take some environmental classes….DEM would be the choice, but, wait, DEM “does not have the resources [money and staff]”. Microplastics are in our bodies….as are PFAS (forever chemicals), but that is for another day. Plastics not only break down into micro-, nano-plastics, but also it breaks down into VOCs and other hazardous chemicals. Hell, artificial turf is a source of microplastics (and PFAS). Humanity just continues to make decisions that will eventually kill itself. Get rid of the lobbyists and the campaign contributions from large corporations. Yes, I know… I am dreaming.
That Rhode Ialand has no bottle bill and lets the beverage compnaies keep on preventing a bottle bill is a stain on the leadership of the legislature and the Governor. Truly pathetic. My persoanl experience with the beverage lobby is I served on the state litter task force about 20 years agho. The bottlers and related busneses stopped progress then, and are still being obstructionist. They lie, cheat and steal from us. The big lie is that a bottle bill witll cost jobs. No state lost jobs in the bottle drink industries when they went to returnable bottles. That we have another study commission after the most recent one wrote a really good bill is pathetic and legislative leadership ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Many years ago, a community college student told me “I don’t need facts. I already know what I think.” (Not RI.) I still haven’t recovered, and it’s clear that mind set is spreading.
I already know the bottle bill is a new tax. I already know it won’t help the litter problem. I aleady know it will put small busnesses out of business. I already know it’s too much trouble for me to return bottles. . . . etc.
When I wondered if the people who were putting the bill together had contacted those states about these problems, I asked a member of the commission. They had. They considered what ever other bottle bill state had done about those problems, and came up with reasonable solutions. The solutions probably aren’t perfect. Nothing is.
But we don’t need facts. We already know what we think. We’re also part of the Amazon/internet insanity: I have a right to have every single thing I ant immediately no matter what the cost to anyone or anything else.
A bottle bill will not destroy the RI beverage business or put small businesses out of business. It will not destroy jobs and put people out of work. It will be a small inconvenience which the beverage industry will quickly pass on to consumers and will find a way to exploit to its advantage. The end result will hopefully be less plastic flowing unchecked into the environment. I myself have walked a one mile stretch of a main road in my town picking up only plastic beverage containers. I retrieved 243 plastic bottles of all sorts- and that was from one side of the road. Of those, 82 were “nips” and 97 more were alcohol containers. Where did those come from? People walking and throwing them away? Not likely. They came from drivers and passengers which implies drinking and driving. I know this is a cherished tradition in Rhode Island but maybe a bottle bill would curtail the sport. Or maybe the legislature could just outlaw nips? It’s high time the legislature ignored special interests and did what’s right for everyone, not just a few. It will mean less money in their reelection coffers but that should not be their first concern, despite the fact that it is. But one word of caution about a bottle bill. It needs to be structured in a way that will NOT allow the state to raid any revenue generated for uses in anything other than environmental or recycling efforts. No social programs, no health care programs, no drug programs, no RIPTA support, etc. This state has a long history of diverting money to things entirely unrelated to the object at hand.
Minimal recycling is what the fossil fuel industry wants. And we know after nearly 40 years of statewide recycling it’s not going to improve, bottle bill or not. So doesn’t it make sense to stop recycling and put our efforts into re-use? We have the learned behavior to put stuff in bins and we have the infrastructure to collect and distribute useful items. Convert the MRF to manage items people want. I put all my plastic in the trash. At least I know it goes to the landfill instead of shipped to parts unknown.
And they couldn’t even ban the “nips”. I sometimes walk the aisles of my grocery store for exercise. The amount of plastic in ONE store is overwhelming for it all will need to be “recycled” in the RI landfill. Most donated clothing to goodwill type stores goes overseas to poor countries where it ends up glutting their streams or being burned as toxic polyester waste. Our poor grandchildren.
If you want to get a bottle bill passed; it needs to be a bottle bill only at this time. Leave out the extended produce responsibility program. Also the bottle deposit fee needs to be the same as our neighboring states. Based on this story the legislative body does not have the appetite to pass a combined bill.