When Jen Conine was packing her car after a weekend camping trip in the Upper Peninsula, she wasn’t expecting to bring home a bag full of her used pop cans.
At the end of her trip, she went to throw away her trash, but was met with an overflowing trash can. She said it was full of recyclable material.
“Why was there no other way to sort recycling, especially in Michigan, when we could get ten cents?” she asked. “So I drove them all the way back, nine and a half hours, to my house to deal with.”
Conine made her way to Meijer on Ann Arbor-Saline Road, where she earned around $25 simply by returning the used cans.
Ten years ago, Conine was among the vast majority of Michiganders who saw the benefit of returning used cans. In the past five years, the percentage of bottles and cans redeemed has been declining.
The 10¢ compromise
Voters passed Michigan’s “Bottle Bill,” or Beverage Container Act, in 1976 as a way to reduce litter and incentivize recycling of single-use plastic and aluminum containers.
“People would just throw things out the windows of their cars,” Matt Lassiter, a history professor at the University of Michigan, said. “They would do cleanups on the Huron River here in Washtenaw County and get thousands of bottles and cans. It was kind of a throwaway society.”
This bill created a 10 cent deposit paid by the consumer every time they buy a carbonated drink, beer, ale, mixed wine, spirit drinks or kombucha in Michigan. The consumer can get this deposit back by returning the beverage containers to the retailer where they were purchased, for up to $25 per trip.
For decades, redeemed deposits ranged between 90-100%, according to the Michigan Department of Treasury. In the past five years, it has fallen to 70%.
As the faculty advisor for Michigan in the World and the Environmental Justice HistoryLab at the university, Lassiter has worked to map the history of this bill.
He said when the bill was passed, it was a compromise for both retailers and recycling advocates. Many bottle bill advocates wanted companies like Coca-Cola to return to reusable glass containers that were common in the 1940s, before single-use cans and plastic bottles became popular.
“There was a little bit of a divide between the retailers and beverage industries that were fighting it, and the ones that saw the 10 cent deposit as a compromise,” he said. “But I think that some of the companies saw recycling as a better alternative than a total ban on plastic and aluminum.”
He said the environmental activists saw the bottle bill as an overall victory as well.
“It was really cumbersome for people to drive their stuff to a recycling center, and there weren't that many recycling centers,” Lassiter said. “The idea was that you could just take it back to the grocery store.”
What has (and hasn’t) changed
Today, Michigan is one of ten U.S. states with a bottle return system. Oregon, Connecticut and California have facilities where beverage containers can be returned independently from retailers. Many of these states have also expanded their bills to include more types of beverage containers.
In Michigan, retailer returns are the only option.
Advocates have been asking for updates to the bottle bill, including establishing universal redemption sites and increasing the types of bottles that can be returned.
Only 57% of beverage containers sold in Michigan are covered by the deposit, according to the Container Recycling Institute. Water bottles, juice and milk containers are not eligible for return.
Michigan also doesn’t have universal redemption, where retailers accept bottles sold only at competing stores.
“I wish we had a better system,” Jen Conine said as she carried a bag of rejected returnables out of the Meijer return center. “Stores don't take all of the same cans. If I bought a specialty beer at one store, I can't return it here. That is just kind of aggravating.”
Kerrin O'Brien, the executive director of the Michigan Recycling Coalition, said its priority is to get more people recycling, whether that’s through bottle deposits or increasing curbside recycling.
Only 68% of Michigan residents have access to curbside recycling, according to the Container Recycling Institute.
“If we can streamline those processes and make them convenient for everybody, then the habits that we have about taking bottles and cans back to the store can really evolve to cover a lot more of the material that we need to take care of on a regular basis,” O’Brien said.
In 2024, Michigan Senator Sean McCann (D-Kalamazoo) proposed a referendum to give voters a chance to expand Michigan’s bottle bill. The bill ultimately died, but in June, he reintroduced the bill. If passed, expansions for the bottle bill will be on the ballot in 2026.
“I am proud to reintroduce legislation to expand Michigan’s Bottle Law to establish universal redemption, extend the deposit to include plastic water bottles, and provide for a realistic funding structure with the entities who operate the system,” McCann said in a statement.
“In hopes of ultimately achieving this, I have continually evolved my proposal based on feedback from environmental stakeholders, industry representatives, state departments and my colleagues in the Michigan Legislature.”
Who is responsible?
The Michigan Retailers Association said they don't have the infrastructure to handle an expansion of the state’s existing bottle bill.
“We believe that expansion of the bottle deposit law is not going to be the answer. That's going to create new issues for retailers,” Drew Beardslee, the vice president of government affairs for the Michigan Retailers Association, said. “Retailers are essentially being asked to do waste management, which is really not part of their purview.”
Beardslee said return rates have dropped because the COVID pandemic caused people to lose the habit of bringing back returnables. Now he believes 10 cents isn’t worth it anymore.
“Inflation starts to make the value of that ten cents less and less,” he said. “They say, ‘Look, it's not worth my 10 cents to collect these and to feed them one at a time through the machine. I'm just going to throw them in my curbside [bin].”
Ten cents in 1976 is equivalent to 56 cents in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While increasing the deposit rate to adjust for inflation and expanding the types of bottles eligible for return could increase Michigan’s redemption rate, Beardslee noted this would also increase the cost of these types of beverages.
“If you expand this to water bottles, then a big 40-pack of water bottles is going to cost you an extra four dollars upfront,” he said. “That might not seem like a whole lot, but to those Michiganders who are experiencing hard times, it's going to make those everyday goods more expensive.”
Common ground on potential changes
Whether cans and bottles are returned to retailers or recycled through curbside pickup, O’Brien said there is still a cost.
“If we are to make producers responsible for the waste that they're ultimately producing, rather than taking that on as citizens and consumers ourselves, then they have a role to play,” she said. “Extended producer responsibility is how that is beginning to happen. It's kind of translated into producers paying for the recycling of their packaging.”
Bottle producers have to pay the state for unredeemed can deposits. The first $1 million goes to Michigan police for fraud prevention. What remains is split; 75% goes to clean up specific sites of contamination and educational resources on pollution prevention. The remaining 25% goes to retailers to cover the handling of redeemed containers, according to EGLE.
O’Brien said retailers should have more money from the unredeemed cans to go back into growing the return system.
“We are not using that money to reinvest in these systems to better manage the materials that we handle every day,” O’Brien said. “Recycling costs you. Recycling costs me.”
Both recycling advocates and retailers agree that making bottle return facilities independent from retailers would create an easier process for everyone.
“The big thing would be to make sure that retailers don't have to be the only place where the redemption can happen,” Beardslee said. “Oregon has kind of a neat process. It's a one-stop shop. You drop it off, you walk away. That's attractive to us.”
In 2010, Oregon started its BottleDrop system. Consumers can take their bottles to independent return centers in bulk and drop off bags without having to sort through them. Then, a credit is sent to an app on their phones.
Jen Conine said she liked the idea of a bulk drop-off system.
"Not having to touch everything, especially when they're not mine, would be awesome," Jenn Conine said. "That would be nice to be able to just dump everything in a bag."
As the bill’s 50th anniversary approaches in November, advocates are working to get the issue on the ballot for midterms.
“Ultimately, whether through a legislative proposal or a ballot initiative, we must achieve the overarching goals of universal redemption for the greater ease of consumers and expansion to plastic water bottles to remove them from the waste stream,” Senator McCann said.
O’Brien agrees and said there is a way to reform the bill that could benefit everyone involved in the process.
“There are ways to make the system more efficient and effective for consumers and also retailers, but those investments really haven't happened in a big way in Michigan, and that's what we'd like to see.”
