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A reader asks: What happened to the city’s failed attempt to implement a nip ban?
Travel-sized alcohol is something of a cultural institution in Massachusetts. Nips, or alcohol bottles under 100 milliliters, make up 15% to 25% of liquor store sales, according to business owners.
Unlike flasks, nip bottles are disposable — the discreet drinker can empty their pockets at a moment’s notice, toss their evidence out of the car window, or, often, simply leave the empty bottle on the sidewalk.
This is the latest installment of a series that answers questions about what’s going on in New Bedford. Ask the Light your question here and our reporters will look into it for you.
When the New Bedford Licensing Board voted unanimously to ban the sale of nips in 2023 in response to litter complaints, the decision was met with jeers and groans. Most speakers who turned out to the public meeting had opposed the ban. In April 2024, a group of liquor store owners sued the board and halted the ban before it took effect, arguing that the city had not followed proper state and local procedure.
Mayor Jon Mitchell had asked the board to put the ban on its agenda a week before the vote without public comment. Per the lawsuit, two of the board’s three members were also “unenrolled” voters, when state and local law requires that the board contain at least one Democrat and at least one Republican.
Over a year later, nips are still free to sell in New Bedford, even as neighboring towns like Fairhaven succeeded in banning the miniature bottles. The lawsuit is in the discovery phase and will not go to pretrial until September 2026. So even if the board wins the suit, the ban could not go into effect until 2027 at the earliest.
Proponents of the ban, including Mitchell, argue that nips often end up as roadway litter and enable drunken behavior. Opponents believe a ban would harm liquor store sales without addressing the root of either problem. Some opponents, like at-large Councilor Ian Abreu, took issue with the entire premise of the ban, saying, “I believe in adults being allowed to make adult decisions.”
Some city councilors agreed with store owners that the ban proposal had not proceeded in the right way. In other Massachusetts cities or towns, nip bans have been enacted by an elected body such as a select board or city council, not a board appointed by the mayor.
City Councilor Leo Choquette opposed the ban, calling it an “overreach” that would not stop consumers from purchasing nips elsewhere.
Others have looked for solutions that cause less harm to the city’s small businesses while still addressing litter. Former Outgoing City Councilor Maria Giesta previously introduced a council motion to make nip bottles eligible for the state’s bottle deposit program, but instead decided to wait on the Legislature to act. A 2024 proposal to include nips in the deposit program passed the State Senate but failed to pass the House.
The Dartmouth Select Board has taken a “wait and see” approach, opting not to enact a nip ban.
Mitchell declined to comment for this story, but city spokesperson Jonathan Darling said in an email that the mayor still supports the ban.
Liquor and litter
Environmentalists point to nips as a major source of everyday litter, although they are not necessarily the top offender.
A recent analysis of trash washed up on Marsh Island in Fairhaven revealed that plastic water bottles were by far the most common form of household trash in the region’s waterways. Over a five-day cleanup led by Operation Clean Sweep in November, volunteers picked up nearly 168 pounds of empty plastic water bottles, 70 pounds of plastic non-water beverage bottles, and 71 pounds of nips.
For context, a 16.9-ounce plastic water bottle, the standard retail size, weighs approximately 0.1 pounds when empty. An empty plastic nip bottle weighs roughly 0.05 pounds depending on the type of bottle. Assuming the bottles were roughly the same size, that translates to over 1,600 plastic water bottles and over 1,400 nips gathered in just one cleanup in one location.
New Bedford has not entertained a plastic single-use water bottle ban, although eight communities in Massachusetts, including many on the Cape and Islands, have already implemented such bans. In 2019, West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard became the first community in the U.S. to ban all single-serve plastic beverage bottles, after a group of middle and high schoolers advocated for the change.
Sara Quintal, a restoration ecologist with the Buzzards Bay Coalition who helped coordinate November’s cleanup, says communities should find ways to encourage more environmentally friendly behavior, rather than address litter issues with blanket bans.
“It just seems like we need to do better to use less [plastic],” Quintal said.
Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
Banning nip sales doesn’t prevent an individual from consuming alcohol, it curtails their littering. If the state’s ineffective house of reps would modernize the bottle bill we wouldn’t have to have these discussions.