HARTFORD — The two bills that would change the way Connecticut recycles are now in the General Assembly garbage heap, a failure of the kind of green legislation that so many lawmakers hail as the wave of the future.

And another green-minded effort — banning plastic shopping bags — also died in the Environment Committee without a vote. The bill to expand the state's nickel-deposit law to include non-carbonated beverages died last month after heavy lobbying that has succeeded in an annual elimination of the bill in recent years.

And a bill that would start pilot programs for so-called single-stream recycling — putting everything from cardboard to Coke bottles in 64-gallon cans for curbside collection — died on Friday morning.

The scene was a scrum of lawmakers, all members of the Government Administration & Elections Committee, assembled in the noisy hall outside the House of Representatives, rather than a quiet meeting room. As loud as the hallway was, the legislation expired quietly, in a 6-7 vote on a clerk's record sheet, at the moment Speaker of the House James A. Amann gaveled the start of the day's session shortly after 11 a.m.

Rep. Christopher L. Caruso, D-Bridgeport, co-chairman of the ethics-minded GAE committee, voted against the bill and seemed pleased when it went down in flames. Nearby, a GAE clerk showed the tally to a few disappointed lawmakers, not members of the GAE panel, who had hoped to bring the single-stream concept

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to a few towns and cities next year to see if recycling percentages could actually rise.

"We're going to revive the bill," said Rep. Richard Roy, D-Milford, co-chairman of the Environment Committee, who stood in a group of four environmentally minded lawmakers who hoped the bill would advance.

"It's the state's opportunity to more than double the recycling of all reusable material," Roy said.

Roy thought opposition to the piece of legislation may have taken on a life of its own in the waning, sometimes tense days of the session, which ends at midnight on Wednesday.

"I think there were some personal issues we will have to overcome," Roy said.

"Single stream, in the end, is going to be the most efficient way," Rep. Terry Backer, D-Stratford. "We need to look at it but we're not going to get it this year," he predicted.

It became even less likely about 7 hours later, when the budget deal precluded new state spending, even the modest amount of the single-stream recycling.

"The CRRA provides the same service absolutely free, so why set up the pilot," Caruso said in an interview on the House floor, referring to the quasi-public Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority.

Caruso said the bill also was perceived as a threat to organized labor. "Privatization has been shown not to work," he said.