Maine’s bottle bill is a container deposit program that charges you 5¢ on most beverage containers (15¢ on wine and spirits over 50 milliliters) at the register and pays that money back when you return the empty to a redemption center or participating retailer. The program dates to a 1976 voter referendum and covers a wide range of drinks sold in the state. In 2023, the Legislature passed two laws that raised the handling fees paid to redemption centers and rebuilt how returned containers are sorted behind the scenes. Neither change affected what you pay or what you get back.
Which Containers Carry a Deposit
The deposit applies broadly. Beer, hard cider, wine coolers, soda, noncarbonated water, and other alcoholic and noncarbonated drinks sold in Maine all carry a deposit. Wine and spirits containers larger than 50 milliliters carry 15¢. Everything else carries 5¢, including the small liquor bottles known as nips, which were added to the program in 2017.
A short list of products is exempt: milk and dairy-derived products, Maine-produced apple cider and blueberry juice, seafood, meat, and vegetable broths, instant drink powders, products designed to be consumed frozen, and liquid syrups or concentrates.
How to Get Your Deposit Back
Bring empty containers to a licensed redemption center or a retailer that accepts returns. Containers must be empty, unbroken, and reasonably clean. Crushed or heavily contaminated containers can be refused. The container also has to bear a registered Maine label, which is how staff confirm it falls within the covered categories.
Licensed redemption centers cannot refuse an empty, unbroken, and reasonably clean container of a kind, size, and brand sold in Maine, provided its label is registered. They must pay the full refund value in cash. If you use a reverse vending machine, it handles the validation automatically. For manual returns, staff check the label and category.
What the 2023 Laws Changed
Higher Handling Fees
Redemption centers earn a handling fee on every container they process, paid by beverage distributors rather than by you. That fee had been 4.5¢ per container since 2019, and centers across the state were struggling financially. LD 134, signed in May 2023, raised the fee to 5.5¢ immediately and then to 6¢ per container starting September 1, 2023. That roughly 33 percent increase gave centers more room to cover labor and operating costs.
A New Commingling System
The bigger structural change came through LD 1909, titled “An Act to Modernize Maine’s Beverage Container Redemption Law.” Before this law, redemption centers had to sort returned containers by individual brand. That was labor-intensive, and a center handling dozens of brands had to keep separate counts and bins for each distributor.
LD 1909 replaces brand sorting with commingling: centers sort by material type, deposit amount, and size instead. Material groups include aluminum, glass, various grades of plastic (clear PET, colored PET, clear or colored HDPE), and other metals. Every initiator of deposit (the company that first collects the deposit on a container sold in Maine) must participate in a commingling agreement.
The law also created a commingling cooperative to oversee collection, processing, and recycling of containers in the program. The cooperative is responsible for completing the transition to full material-based sorting by October 1, 2026.
Flexibility for Automated Centers
Centers using reverse vending machines or account-based bulk processing programs get additional flexibility. They are not required to sort by color, deposit value, or size. The cooperative may negotiate with those centers to gather brand-level data through their automated systems, and any cost of that data collection falls on the cooperative rather than on the center.
Grants for Technology Upgrades
The Cost and Carbon Efficient Technology Fund, managed by the Department of Environmental Protection, provides grants to redemption centers to lease or purchase automated counting, compacting, and sorting equipment, including reverse vending machines. Grants must cover at least 25 percent of the technology’s cost, and the fund also covers associated installation expenses like electrical upgrades, building modifications, and internet connections. Adopting automated equipment is not required; the fund is designed to make it financially realistic for centers that want to move that direction.
What You’ll Notice at the Counter
Deposit amounts have not changed. You still pay 5¢ on most beverages and 15¢ on wine and spirits at the register, and you get that money back when you return the empty. The list of covered beverages is the same broad set it has been, covering essentially everything except dairy, certain Maine-produced juices, broths, and frozen or powdered products.
Over time, returns should get faster. As the commingling transition completes by October 2026, centers will no longer sort your returns by brand, which should cut wait times. Centers that install reverse vending machines or automated counters using technology fund grants will process returns faster and more accurately. And the higher handling fees improve the financial stability of redemption centers, which matters in rural parts of Maine where a closure can mean a long drive to the next one.
Boundaries Worth Knowing
The bottle bill covers beverage containers sold in Maine that bear a registered Maine label. Containers bought out of state generally will not have that label and can be refused. Exempt products, no matter how similar they look to covered ones, carry no deposit and cannot be redeemed. If a container is broken, not reasonably clean, or missing its label, the center can turn it away.