Lawmakers consider rewriting Vermont’s bottle bill to shift to producer stewardship, add transition grants and arbitration for pay disputes

Senate Natural Resources & Energy examined a new draft of H.915 on April 17, which would overhaul parts of Vermont’s bottle bill to establish a producer stewardship organization (PRO) model and add guardrails intended to protect small redemption centers.

The bill moves the term “deposit initiator” into the statute’s general definitions to identify the entity responsible for including the deposit in a beverage’s price and for program participation. The presenter said that the deposit initiator could be a distributor, a manufacturer that initiates its own deposit, or, if none of those parties initiates a deposit, the first distributor to place the container into Vermont commerce.

Sponsor testimony also keeps the current per-container handling fee in place until March 1, 2029, the implementation date for the PRO. The agency said the handling fee will remain while the state transitions to a stewardship model, then be replaced by the PRO’s funding approach.

A central change requires stewardship plans to include a methodology describing what constitutes “fair…