More than 90 million “nip” bottles of alcohol are sold in Connecticut each year — and many of them end up as litter. Should they be banned?

WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Sasha Allen to discuss her article, “More nips are being bought in CT — some advocates are worried,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Sasha’s story here.

WSHU: Hello, Sasha. Let’s talk about nips. I never knew how the name came about until I read your article. So how did the name come about?

SA: Yeah, so the name is a word from the 1700s, nipperkin. I was looking around. There were a bunch of thoughts on what the origin would be, but it’s some European word. And in the 1770s, they just took off the back part of the word, and they started calling it nips. And nipperkin meant alcohol measuring less than a half pint. And yeah, that’s where it came from.

WSHU: Interesting. In 2022, the legislature decided to do something about nips, because litter was becoming a problem with nips, and they passed a law that they’d have a nickel per nip bottle deposit, and that money would go to the towns to help with cleanup.

SA: Yeah, yeah. The law was passed in 2021, I believe. And then the surcharge was instituted in 2022, so yeah, it, you know, people were complaining that there were nips littered everywhere on the streets, and it was, you know, a big issue in a lot of towns, and they decided to instate the surcharge that can be used towards any environmental initiative. So towns can hire a recycling coordinator, they can purchase, like a street sweeper, stuff like that. And it doesn’t have to be directly related to the nips, but it does. It does help to clean them up.

WSHU: But now there’s some pushback, and in some towns, basically, there’s a push to get rid of the nips completely, because it seems as if this is a problem that the cleanup is not handling. There’s still a lot of litter, and there are also concerns that, from the numbers, it seems that we have an alcohol problem.

SA: Yeah, yeah.

WSHU: Let’s talk about the numbers. You did an analysis of the numbers. What do the numbers show? As far as bottles being sold in Connecticut.

SA: The numbers show that there were a lot more being sold in 2025 than there were when the program started in 2022. On average, I think it’s like 93.8 million are sold per year. Which is, those are big numbers, right? I did a town-by-town breakdown, kind of a per capita look at how many nips are being sold in each town. And in some towns, we saw that there were 129 nips being purchased yearly per resident over the age of 21. So those numbers are really high, and they concern some of the advocates, not only for environmental reasons. You know, there are a lot of people who are very worried about how wildlife responds to the litter and then, just like the general cleanliness of their towns. But you know, people are also really worried about drinking and driving, especially since most of these bottles are found on roadsides, some without sidewalks, so presumably they’re being thrown out the windows of cars.

WSHU: Okay. And so there’s, there’s an organization that has been formed called Connecticut Towns Nixing the Nip. Can you just tell us a little bit about that organization and what they’re trying to do?

SA: Yeah. So they were formed a couple of years ago as well, and they, you know, they’ve been trying to nix the nip, as they say, ban it in some towns. What, what they really want to do is allow towns to ban it if they so choose to. So they don’t want to ban it statewide, but right now, alcohol is regulated at a state level, so they want to allow towns to vote if they choose to ban the sale of nips in their town. They introduced some legislation back in 2023 that had a hearing and stuff like that. There was testimony on it, but it died. It died. A lot of people were in favor of it, but it died.

WSHU: Now, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities is pushing back on this because a lot of towns depend on this money. You did an analysis of the kind of money that is generated for the towns, and what did you find?

SA: Yeah, I believe, actually, Connecticut municipalities, you know, they think this is a good tax and stuff, but they also, I think, would be in favor. I spoke with someone over there, they would be in favor of banning it on a town-by-town basis, allowing them to ban on a time-by-time basis, is what someone from CCM told me. But they also told me that the money is being used for recycling coordinators, street sweepers, stuff like that. And, you know, in Waterbury, I believe they used a lot of their revenue from the surcharge for litter vacuums and for street sweeper brooms, which you know are supposed to help with that.

WSHU: But the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers are definitely against this, and they feel that this should be regulated on a state basis. It shouldn’t be a town-by-town situation, as it’s difficult to operate in that type of situation. Could you just tell us what the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers have to say about this?

SA: Yeah, they’re definitely against this. They do not support town regulation of alcohol. So one of their arguments is that the towns don’t have, like, many sources of revenue, besides, like, you know, taxes and stuff like that. So this is one of the few. And their argument is that the towns are doing good stuff with this money, so why take it away from them? Their other argument is also that, yeah, towns should not have the ability to regulate alcohol, that it’s been done at the state level for decades, and stuff like that. So they don’t want to, they don’t want towns to be able to regulate it. You know, it’s actually interesting. Both groups have given me this example of Chelsea, Massachusetts. There’s a town in Massachusetts that banned nips, and the town saw a lot of benefits, but there were reports that the surrounding towns were impacted. More people were buying nips there. There was more litter there. But so, you know, wine and spirit wholesalers use that as an example. The Nix the Nips group also uses that as an example, because a lot of drinking-related EMT visits went down.

WSHU: In the meantime, Representative Mary Mushinski, who’s the longest serving legislator that we have in Connecticut, she started, she first got into office in 1980 and she’s retiring this year, and she’s pushing this as something that she’d like to get through this year. She says, we have an alcohol problem. Could you just tell us what Mushinski has to say about this and how confident she is that they might get something passed this year?

SA: Yeah, no, she was very in favor of either banning this, allowing towns to ban it if they so choose to, or just kind of regulating it in a different way, but yeah, says that Connecticut has a drinking problem. People are drinking way too many nips, and this is an issue, both for the environment, on the environmental side of things, but also on the public safety side of things, drinking and driving. And she, yeah, she also, I believe, one of the things she wanted to push through was to put them under the bottle bill system with a refundable deposit. Because currently you can’t, you can’t deposit nips bottles.

WSHU: So it’s just a surcharge that you pay up front. You don’t get anything back from it; it goes to the towns.

SA: Yeah, you don’t get anything back. You can’t, you know, deposit them at a recycling center. You just pay five cents extra whenever you buy a bottle of whatever. So, yeah, she, you know, there are some issues with the recycling side of things. Some people say that the bottles are too small to go through the recycling process. But you know, she was hoping to do something on that side of things as well as of right now, there is no legislation introduced, and I’m not very confident that there would be a specific bill on this. However, there is a bottle bill that the advocates have been urged to testify and share their own thoughts about nips, specifically.