In four days of cleanups in Plymouth, volunteers picked up over 14,000 empty nip bottles. This is despite the fact that town wide cleanups have been occurring twice a year for over a decade. Imagine how many would have been collected this year if it was the town’s first event.

In Falmouth, 32% of all litter items collected in cleanups were nips, making them the most pervasive item in the litter stream. After Falmouth’s nip ban went into effect, only 6% of litter items were nips.

On the May 10, 2023 PACTV “This Week in Plymouth” program focusing on the cleanup to come that weekend, Town Manager, Derek Brindisi, mentioned the Seaside Trail extension project and what the DPW workers had found. As he noted, they “filled up multiple trash bags with just nip bottles alone” and stated “Clearly there is a problem in the community” with nip litter. Our prior town manager, Melissa Arrighi, felt that nips were such a problem that during
her administration, she recommended a nip ban to the Select Board.

Six years ago, Plymouth passed a plastic shopping bag ban. Based on five years of research by the Mass Food Association (lobbyists for the supermarkets), in 2012 the average supermarket gave out over 2,682,062 million disposable bags annually. Multiplying that by the number of
markets in Plymouth times 6 years, that equals over 96 million bags removed from our environment. We can do the same for nips.

In our region, Falmouth, Mashpee, Brewster, Nantucket, Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, Fairhaven, New Bedford, and Wareham have all passed regulations to prohibit nips. Newton and Brookline passed regulations. Chelsea, MA has had good results with a ban in effect since July 2018. Boston will not grant a new liquor license unless the establishment agrees not to sell nips.  Salem and Cambridge are considering bans, there is interest in a number of other Cape towns and Quincy’s mayor has favored one. More and more towns are moving to act.

Some version of an expanded or updated bottle bill, including nip bans, have been filed every legislative session for over 23 years (since at least 2000).  For 30 years, there has been no appetite on Beacon Hill for increasing our existing bottle bill from a nickel to a dime. All bottle bills are always buried in committee and never allowed to get to the floor for a vote. This is happening this session with a bill endorsed by our Senator Moran as well as with 11 other bottle
bill proposals.

Deposit legislation that would include nips in particular have failed for four consecutive years in the Massachusetts House and Senate. The only way the State will act is when a critical mass of municipalities pass bans. Plymouth needs to take care of itself just as it did decades ago when it passed a ban on smoking in restaurants before Beacon Hill acted. State legislators will follow,
not lead.

Nips found on the side of our roadways are evidence of someone drinking where they should not. Each nip is the equivalent of a shot in a bottle. Nips make it easy for drivers to consume alcohol and avoid concerns about the open container law by throwing the bottle out the window. Nips
also make it easier for individuals to hide their level of consumption from parents, family, friends and employers. Higher concentrations are found in the vicinity of liquor stores as well as by our secondary schools.

Nips are also a polluting, single use disposable product. They are not biodegradable and leach toxins into the environment as they break down into smaller and smaller microplastics. Scientist and medical researchers are now finding microplastics in human blood, stool, hearts, lungs and in women’s placentas and breast milk. No one knows as of yet what the impact on human health will be, but it can’t be good. The Plymouth Board of Health voted in favor of the nip ban.

Years of research have demonstrated that with increased cost, there is a reduction in excessive consumption and all alcohol related harm including drinking and driving (e.g.: CDC, National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, American Journal of Preventive Medicine and more).

Data from Chelsea demonstrates the same and how a ban can affect behavioral change. Chelsea’s ban went into effect in 2018. There were 742 ambulance and fire department responses in the year prior to the ban.  By 2019, calls were down to 127. Public drunkenness diminished as
evidenced by decreases in protective custody: 222 instances in 2018 to 86 in 2019. Brian Keyes, the police chief in Chelsea at the time when its ban was passed and a past president of the Massachusetts Major City Police Chiefs Association, strongly supported the regulation saying it was a “game changer” that “transformed” Chelsea.  Keith Houghton, the current Chief, was quoted this year stating that Chelsea continues to see fewer instances where authorities must place people into protective custody.   If the theory that eliminating nips would lead to more consumption and related problems was true, the numbers in Chelsea should have gone up. Instead, public drinking was radically reduced and these benefits are holding 5 years later. (Note: These numbers were retrieved by a representative from Chelsea’s police department and from Cataldo Ambulance who was the contracted provider for the city in 2019).

With a nip ban, half pints will be the smallest liquor container available for sale. Half pints are not used by drivers in the same manner as nips. Driving and drinking from a half pints risks drawing attention. In towns with nip bans, there have not been reports of significant increases in half pint littering. What is truly dangerous are the “flights” of nips sold by liquor stores, twelve
nips to a pack. That is the equivalent of three times the amount of alcohol in a half pint, all in easily drunk and disposed of bottles.