Time to stop nips in the bud

“And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand over Egypt so that locusts swarm over the land and devour everything growing in the fields, everything left by the hail.” — Exodus, 10:12

Like the locusts of the Old Testament, nip bottles have descended on New Bedford. Not just New Bedford, but Fairhaven, Dartmouth, you name it. Why, I hear they have even made it onto the highways and byways of Freetown. Something about people liking to drink nips in their cars and then quickly destroying the evidence by throwing them out the window.

But it is in urban centers that you really see the swarms of nip bottles in their fullest flower.

In the park at Custom House Square, you will see them in mighty bloom after the weekend and especially before trash day.

In the overflowing bins that are not emptied frequently enough. On the park’s granite stone performance space, in the adjacent historic district’s cobblestone streets, in the storm drains at the old BayCoast bank drive-thru, along the downtown bus station sitting walls.

It’s not just the downtown. It’s any commercial street in the city.

A stroll up Acushnet Avenue in the North End is a stroll by some of the beautiful street gardens that the city has installed, but it’s also a walk by flower beds where the blossoms compete with the nips. Fireballs and apple vodka may as well be the garden watering of choice.

Rite Aid did a great job installing a tree-lined border for its Avenue store, but right there among the mulch are the nip bottles. At night, the Avenue merchants lock their gates and into the doorways are thrown the nips and other alcoholic containers. Every one of the nice off-street parking lots the city has installed up and down the Ave. has become a nip haven.

Into this mess, enter the New Bedford City Council with their usual mixture of outrage and ineptitude.

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God love them, I love the city councilors on an individual basis. Every one of them is the kind of gal or guy you’d love to have a beer with, maybe even knock down a nip if no one was looking. But to a man and woman, the councilors can’t ever seem to grasp that they work for the New Bedford citizens as a whole and not the special interests that always seem to have the councilors’ ears.

Be it city worker unions or small business owners, local social clubs or neighborhood groups, New Bedford councilors first, last and always seem to side with the narrowest of interests over the citizens as a whole, over the taxpayers as a whole. That’s just their way.

So a year-and-a-half after the councilors first asked the Appointments and Briefings Committee to look into the problem of nip bottles in New Bedford, the issue remains, er … bottled up in committee.

Committee Chair Naomi Carney is one of the nicest folks to ever sit on the council, but she is aligned with the special interest forces of this intractable body. And she knows how to keep an issue from seeing the light of day.

Carney, unlike some councilors, is always responsible enough to call me back. So she pointed out (as has the nip motion’s sponsor Ward 2 Councilor Maria Giesta) that the council has been waiting on the state Legislature to act.

Well, anyone who has ever dealt with the state Legislature knows that can be a long, long wait.

It’s not that the Legislature doesn’t want to do something. They generally do. It’s just that at the state level, even more than at the city level, issues are complex. And the state reps well know that the idea of adding more plastic to a recycling market that is already dormant is a dead-end idea, at least unless the market revives. Nip bottles are also too small to be recycled with current sorting equipment and the Department of Environmental Protection advises folks not to recycle them.

But the councilors keep crowing that they think a five-cent bottle deposit on nips will certainly put an end to this litter problem. That’s a solution, they claim, that our dear local liquor salespeople can live with.

I don’t have anything against liquor store owners. The very nice folks at Biltmore Liquors in the downtown were some of my good friends for many years. I wouldn’t say I was a frequent customer but I certainly was a regular one there!

The stores have a right to make a living — I hear that as much as 10-15% percent of their business is in nips. Unfortunately, they just shouldn’t sell a product that is hurting society so greatly.

We make the same kind of sales restrictions on folks who sell everything from food to toys to cleaning solvents to cars, when we feel a product is hurting society.

And who is the largest portion of the nip market anyway?

I’ll tell you what one big part of it is. The kind of folks who throw out nip bottles in city parks and along city commercial streets are not the kind of folks who are redeeming bottles. These are folks who are in the throes of substance addiction. They can barely organize their lives well enough to find a place to sleep, never mind bringing their nip bottles in for a nickel.

Oh, but the councilors say, there are people who travel all around the city collecting deposit bottles to make a few bucks, so they will certainly scour the parks and commercial drags for the nip bottles.

No, not really, nope, nada. Not happening.

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Based on my travels around the downtown and North End this week, there are almost as many discarded beer cans, which already are redeemable for a nickel, as there are plastic nip bottles. The people who collect deposits can find recyclables far quicker in neighborhood recycling bins than they can find them scouring the often dirty, crushed cans and nippers that are scattered more and more like locusts through the city’s parks and commercial neighborhoods.

Seemingly tired of waiting for the council to act, Mayor Jon Mitchell has asked the Licensing Board, whose actions cannot be reversed by either the council or the mayor, to ban the nips, just as the Fairhaven Town Meeting overwhelmingly did a few weeks ago.

Odd, the Licensing Board had posted that it had no regular meetings for the months of July and August when the mayor’s office told me the board would be taking up the matter at their “regular” July meeting. And just like that, someone changed the online posting to say there will be a public hearing next Monday, July 24.

Hmm … it’s election time. It’s certainly looking like JM will be running for an unprecedented sixth consecutive term as that time for taking out papers winds down to next Friday.

For the record, the mayor says he does not know why the Licensing Board changed its mind about meeting but that there are other things on its agenda and some city boards do meet in the summer.

Political though he may be, Mitchell once again looks like he’s on the right side of the issue to the council’s own politicking.

Here’s what environmental activist Mary Lou Nicholson told Councilor-at-large Ian Abreu this week when she got wind that he, along with the rest of the council majority, were doing everything they can to prevent the Licensing Board from instituting a ban on nips.

Nicholson, the coordinator of Be the Solution to Pollution and Climate Reality Southcoast, wrote to Abreu that nips are not recyclable, they are trash. They contaminate single-stream recycling and easily slide down storm drains, she wrote.

By the way, I can vouch for Nicholson on this as I found a number of storm drains clogged by nip bottles around the city in my travels on Tuesday and Wednesday. And I don’t think anyone is reaching into those drains for a deposit.

Single-stream recycling, by the way, is the current industry standard, and it is what killed China’s participation in America’s recycling business. The materials are just too dirty, and too hard to reprocess to be economical.

Nicholson’s group also got at just how big the problem with nip bottles is. Last August, she said, her group collected 32,886 nips and spelled out #BREAKFREEFROMPLASTIC on the quad at UMass Dartmouth, with the help of students and community members. Thousands of those nips, she said, came from New Bedford beaches, parks and roadways.

But here’s where Nicholson really convinced me. She noted the population that overwhelmingly buys nips. It is not people who drink socially or have a bottle of vodka or wine on hand for an occasion. It is people who struggle with alcohol addiction and/or who buy it and drink quickly and discard it just as quickly on the streets.

“Nip bottles encourage underaged drinking, alcoholism and drinking and driving since they are easily concealed,” she wrote to Abreu.

She ended by saying that she cares more about health, safety and the environment rather than profit. That sounds a little preachy about the free market but I get her point.

I had not heard back from Abreu about Nicholson’s letter by press time, but I think Nicholson gets at what bothers a lot of people about the sale and inevitable trashing of the environment with nip bottles. 

It is catering to a dysfunctional behavior and making it easier. Yes, we don’t want to ever outlaw alcohol again in this country; it doesn’t work. But we do want to continue to regulate its sale, especially in the age of plastic, where it has become both an environmental disaster and a motivation toward easy dysfunctional behavior.

The swarms of nip bottles are already in the city. We need to change. We’ve already done something similar by banning the plastic bags, and it has not been the end of the world going to cloth shopping bags and paper. The same is true of nips.

People will certainly find another way of drinking in public places. Perhaps just not so easily.

Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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