Mini-liquor bottles, also known as "nips;" you have seen them everywhere, sometimes on the ground in the form of litter.
The liquor industry and state leaders have taken steps to address this, but one group says it’s not working; advocating for towns to have the right to ban their sale.
It didn’t take long to find mini-liquor bottles, or nips, strewn on streets and sidewalks, right outside Hartford’s scenic Bushnell Park.
The problem, according to Cynthia Chesky of Connecticut Towns Nixing the "Nip,” has been that we can find them everywhere, like in her hometown of Bristol. So, she started picking them up.
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“Within just about two months, I collected about 7,000 nip bottles, and year to date is over 60,000, just in Bristol,” Chesky said.
Tom Metzner of Glastonbury co-founded the group with Chesky, and says right now towns can’t ban the sale of mini-liquor bottles.
“The Liquor Control Act 1933, which regulates the way we sell and licensed distribution of liquor goes back to prohibition, and inadvertently denied towns the right to ban categories of alcohol,” Metzner said.
The group has found a lawmaker willing to shepherd that legislation through.
But Connecticut liquor wholesalers, distributors, and retailers have something to say about that.
Larry Cafero, executive director and general counsel for Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of Connecticut told NBC Connecticut that while towns can ban things like the use of plastic bags, banning mini liquor bottles would be giving them the authority to oversee how an intoxicant is sold.
“We in Connecticut for the past 90 years have regulated all matters concerning alcoholic beverages statewide," Cafero said. He continued, "We have a patchwork of rules and regulations on myriad of things, but we don’t on intoxicants. When we start to allow municipalities to choose which products they want to sell, that is not good.”
Cafero added there’s a five-cent tax on these mini-liquor bottles, with the proceeds going to towns and cities to clean up the litter.
He said he believes we need to give this program a little time to work first, as it has only been up and running for two years.
Meanwhile, Cafero said in some cases mini-liquor bottle sales comprise as high as a quarter of a liquor store’s annual sales, so an outright ban could especially impact smaller mom and pop stores.
He noted that for the past few years, Connecticut consumers have purchased 94 million mini liquor bottles a year, on average.
