There is fear that some significant portion of the recent increase in redemption rate may be due to fraud. Oregon recently increased the redemption from 5 cents to 10 cents, but the neighboring state of Washington still does not have a deposit. This creates an incentive for people to scavenge bottles in Washington and return them across the border in Oregon.
Here's a recent article about the problem: "Oregon senator to introduce bill to thwart return of bottles, cans bought in Washington: She says grocery stores ‘drowning’ in out-of-state containers"
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some spillover from Washington or California, but I doubt that it can be an incredibly high percentage.
Frankly, I think it’s better that these cans and bottles are being recycled, fraudulently or otherwise. I’m sure it hurts the Oregon pocketbook, but according to the article, the cost of the program is only six figures. This is only a problem (cost wise) when redemption is over 100%.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some spillover from Washington or California, but I doubt that it can be an incredibly high percentage.
Why do you doubt that it could be a high percentage? A huge number of folks live in Vancouver across the OR/WA border and commute into Portland every day, and do their shopping in OR for the lack of sales tax.
The border cities of Washington, Clark county (Vancouver) and Tri Cities, only account for ~600k people compared to ~2M in Portland and 4M in Oregon overall [some quick searching]. I would expect the fraud rate coming from Washington's central and northern cities to be much lower. By headcount alone, the Washington contribution is maybe conservatively 25%, even if you think those urban areas are recycling at a higher rate than Oregon's rural areas.
You just said it. They do their shopping in Oregon. So they probably buy the bottles their tax free. Save ten cents on tax, spend it on deposit. It's a wash to the consumer.
> You just said it. They do their shopping in Oregon.
Which makes it quite convenient for them to “return” bottles gathered from other people who shop near where the returner loves in WA to Oregon for the deposit.
You seem to be only considering people returning bottles purchased for their own consumption.
The lack of sales tax doesn't really affect whether or not they buy considerable number of cans/bottles in OR - I just meant to say that it is _very common_ for Vancouver folks to shop for general goods after work in Portland, or drive into Portland area on the weekends. If they are saving bottles/cans it's very likely not an extra trip for them.
Many people in Oregon just give away their cans to the street. I imagine this is true in Washington as well. If a person collects free cans in Washington, where they're worth less, and brings them to Oregon for a higher return, then they would be gaming the system.
I think you're misunderstanding parent - Oregon has no sales tax, so the price of cans/bottles will be about the same as Washington, which has no deposit.
It's 10 cents a bottle. Are we really at the point in our society where someone is simultaneously commuting from Vancouver yet is still in such a precarious situation that it's worth it to collect a bunch of bottles to trade them in?
100 bottles is only $10! Think about the amount of effort required for this
A few years back, California's recycling rate for plastic was 104%[0]. It can get pretty high because recyclers, not just individuals, can go across the border for a better rate.
You are seriously underestimating the amount of money involved, and what it means to the folks that do it. My neighbor recycles trash bags full of cans at a time and nets 20-40 bucks a bag. He does this a couple of times a month. For very little effort he's making an extra hour or two worth of wages just for taking a bag into recycling. It's extremely minimal work since he does it on his way to/from work, and absolutely a non-trivial gain for him.
There's no doubt some significant overhead to the program, that is likely modeled as being covered in part by the "slippage" of bottles that don't get returned. Fraudulent returns cut into that allowance, even before the redemption rate hits 100%.
Yeah, like building huge dedicated recycling centers. Those aren't cheap. You used to return the bottle/can to the store, who returned them back to the distribution companies when they were dropping off new orders. Now there are huge areas where they got rid of returning to the place of purchase and you have to return them to these large, brand new, dedicated recycling centers. I have no idea why they do that, or who pays for that. It seemed logical to return them utilizing the existing infrastructure (stores) that were selling the products.
Edit: more info.
One thing about the recycling centers though - you have to have an account, and you have to prove you are an OR resident to use them. I imagine that cuts down on a lot of out of state cans.
When I worked at Safeway or WalMart here in OR, the can returns were nightmares. Extremely dirty, they'd fill up fast, and customers were always in a bad mood when they had to wait for me to get the machines working again. Oh, yeah, those machines were horrid. They got jammed all the time.
Oh, and stores would limit what kind of returns they'd accept. So I'd have say, sorry, we don't sell that here so you can't return it here.
So, I'd imagine some of that is why they created the centers. Which, btw, I only just learned about from this topic.... :)
How does the Oregon program "know" if a returned bottle is bona fide or fraudulent (from out of state)? I don't see how substituting units of a fungible quantity, which identical bottles seem to be, can have the consequences you suggest.
If OBRC collects a dime on 2.0 billion bottles per year ($200M deposit revenue), with an assumption that 20% of those will not end up being returned (resulting in $40M in slippage) and has overall annual budget costs of $34M, they are ever so slightly profitable.
Just a small amount of "excess" returns (bottles for which OBRC did not initially collect the dime, but pays out the dime) can push the overall program into the red. In the example above, only a 3% increase in return rate (from 80 to 83%) pushes the program into the red.
You seem to be saying that if the scheme somehow becomes more successful than expected, they stand to go into the red. Maybe so. But this is surely the case whatever source the "excess" or unexpected returns come from.
If you're claiming that the scheme is currently funded in such a way that something like a 3% improvement in return rate (fraudulent or genuine, OBRC can't tell) is a problematic financial event, then I suppose I get it.
The externality argument based on the cost of landfill (made by another commenter) is sensitive to whether the bottles come from out of state.
> How does the Oregon program "know" if a returned bottle is bona fide or fraudulent (from out of state)?
The program doesn't on a per bottle bases, but the effectiveness at dealing with the problem the program aims to solve (local landfilling recyclable containers) is impacted by the substitution; in the context of the function served, imported bottles that would not otherwise be imported are not fungible with local bottles.
If return rate hits 100% then it's a success IMO. Oregan has then successfully ensured that for every bottle used in their state that they also recycle one. Does it matter if it's a non-Oregan bottle?
And having people drive bottles in from outside states, presumably burning fossil fuels in the process, kinda defeat much of the point behind recycling in the first place.
Someone has to pay for the costs of the program (OBRC program costs are around $34M/yr per a slide deck I found and seem to currently be funded by slippage in return rate).
If Oregon returns hit 100%, leaving no funds to pay for the program, the program isn't likely to continue without state taxpayer funding (currently, it's funded from the program itself and not the state's taxpayers).
As a theoretical point, even with a 100% return rate, it's still possible to make money on the float. Buy a 12-pack, deposit $1.20, return 1 week later, get $1.20 back, but in the meanwhile that buck-and-change could make ~1/50¢ in interest.
The same report says they do about 2 billion containers / year, which at 10¢/container is $200M. In the optimistic case of 1 year between purchase and return, assuming 2% interest, that's $4M. Assuming 1 week, I think it's $100K, so not much.
A more likely income source is the profit from selling relatively clean metal, glass, and PET. That report says 151.0 M Aluminum Cans per quarter. I see numbers around 2¢/can for the metal value, so that's $3M/quarter or call it $10M/year.
So even with 100% return rate, there is still money coming in. Just (as you say) not enough to pay for the program.
In Iowa the stores read the bar code and will not accept a bottle/can if it couldn't have been bought at that store. One side effect is nobody buys store brand as it has to go back to that store, while "coke" can be returned to any store.
If there really was a problem I'd expect to see a different barcode for cans/bottles sold in Oregon vs other states.
Years ago we did it by barcode. It sounds like there is some reason that does not work now, but back when I would bother to return soda cans, the machine that collected/crushed them would scan the barcode and reject the out-of-state ones.
When it's not redeemed in one state, it's cheap to obtain in that state. Folks would fill up Trucks or van, drive across a state and obtain hundreds of tax free dollars a day. This happened in Michigan, folks drove over from Ohio.
Portland borders Washington, but not California. It makes no sense for any there to be spillover from California and with the large homeless population who can regularly be seen scavanging public dumpsters, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't also check Vancouver, WA which is part of the Portland metro area.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some spillover from Washington or California
Probably not systematically from CA, which also has a bottle deposit (though there may be some arbitrage opportunity since the CRV is, IIRC, 5¢ for some containers that have a 10¢ deposit on Oregon.)
There's a bigger reason why there's unlikely to be much spillover from CA: geography. The CA/OR border is in the middle of the Siskiyou Mountains. There are few major cities near the border -- the closest pair are Yreka, CA and Ashland, OR, and they're 40-50 miles apart.
The fear that these rates were the product of fraud even lead to amendments to the recycling act in 2008, namely adding a state-specific mark to bottles. Yet the redemption rate remains over 90%.
The large grocery stores in Oregon are required to accept up to 144 bottles per person per day (or $14.40/person/store/day in potential profit). At that price it doesn't really seem to be worth it to do that sort of arbitrage.
It's very easy to go over this limit by simply going to a different checkout line, or going through the same line multiple times.
At least that's how I got over the limit in Michigan when I was in college. We used to save all our cans and bottles for the whole year and return them all at once.
You're not going to make much profit off the effort though, unless you value your time at $0.
You wouldn't defraud the system by taking redeeming at someone else's store. You'd open your own version of something like https://www.bottledropcenters.com/.
I'm guessing that redemption centers need to put up a hefty bond. To get enough volume of cans to make it even approaching worth your time to open a redemption center you'd need to collect tens of thousands of bottles and cans from hundreds or thousands of people, who would all want to be compensated in some way, that would be difficult to hide for very long.
You'd collect them from a recycling facility the next state over, which you also own or work with in some capacity (and where there's no deposit). Owning the redemption center means no one blinks an eye when you drive up with a truck full of bottles, especially as you've mixed them up with actual redemptions.
This is not hypothetical stuff. Large scale operations have already been caught:
> Three suspects were arrested in a case that resulted in fraudulent payouts totaling $16.1 million over three years, the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery reported Monday.
> Authorities said the Bustillos' trucking operation existed entirely to smuggle cans and bottles into California.
I live in Portland, there's certainly not anyone drowning in bottles. There are long lines at the redemption centers because cans and bottles need to be put into the machines one at a time and we have a fairly large homeless population that uses them for an income. That's about the only issue I've seen so far.
As an Oregon resident I actually feel like those bottles getting redeemed from out-of-state is better off than them going into a landfill. I think we can take whatever the offset to revenue is.
Is this still even a thing? Michigan also has a 10 cent deposit, and fraud was an issue in the 90's, but it's been fixed since. Grocery stores use automated bottle scanners to check barcodes. I'm not sure how you could "fool" a machine that needs a barcode for each physical bottle return.
It does check the barcode, but a generic coke bottle could have been purchased in Washington and returned across the boarder for 10 cents.
That’s a valid bottle, but an abuse of the system because they are getting 10 cents from Oregon that was never paid. The point of the program is you pay 10 cents and get it back if you recycle.
Michigan's bottle return isn't really a good system considering most of the machines will always reject bottles from other store brands, and will often reject less popular bottles/cans from the same store. Plus, it only applies to carbonated drinks.
Okay, so you're down to $.0499 (aprox) per bottle. That's not taking into account the time needed to do this, or the time needed to collect the bottles, or the gas/equipment needed to haul the bottles.
This sounds like a dozens of dollars level scam, not millions.
$0.05 and 10 seconds per bottle is $18/hour, which is decent. (Although that doesn't account for actually getting the bottle, or travel, or redeeming the bottle which isn't very fast.)
> not millions
No, not individually, but if tons of people are doing it all day, it adds up.
And bumping the fee to $0.10 makes it $36/hour which is very attractive to someone who doesn't have a job.
Again, the actual earnings are lower, but I think it's a realistic type of fraud.
This plan doesn't scale. You can't bump the fee to $.10 an hour because there's fixed costs associated with this specific plan (paper, glue, transportation, etc).
There is a viable way to do recycling fraud, but DIY stickers isn't it.
Isn't it fundamentally flawed though to assume that the people in the neighboring state are better than the people in your state at redeeming the deposits? The incentives are the same to people in both states and I assume only people living close to the border would be so incentivized while in the state with the redemption policy, it applies to people anywhere in the state. It feels like a sort of fear-mongering...
Homegrown Oregonian here: it's common knowledge that to maximize profit against the system, a person should work in Vancouver WA where cost of living is low and state income tax doesn't exist, and then shop in Oregon where sales tax doesn't exist. The bottle return scheme wouldn't surprise me either, as the PNW is profoundly supportive of recycling.
Those discrepancies should already be accounted for by the entities concerned, right? Vancouver WA employers should be able to pay a lower tax-free salary to match the net of an Oregon tax-burdened salary, and Oregon retailers should be able to charge a higher tax-free price to match a WA tax-inclusive price.
Maybe they don't in practice because consumers don't rationally consider the net numbers, but theoretically they should.
Then force in-state distributors to use packaging with Oregon specific UPCs. I have mixed NJ/NY bottles that I redeem in NY. Some but not all NJ bottles will be recognized by the machines.
I get that Washington bottle buyer hasn't paid a deposit.
But if Oregon bottle buyer has paid a deposit for a bottle, but chooses not to recycle it, there is a deposit that has been paid, but not claimed.
What is the problem with the Washington bottle buyer returning their bottle in return for the deposit back?
A bottle is returned, which is surely the aim of the deposit. The return rate is below 100% so there aren't unfunded deposits.
I think the usual argument is that the program costs something to run, and was designed with the assumption that returns would not actually be 100%. Any returns beyond the planned level mean that the program is underfunded, and thus potentially unsustainable. It's also generally considered bad for illegal activity to be allowed to continue.
Separately, it's not clear the bottles illegally being returned for deposit are increasing the recycling rate. The article I linked suggests that they are being scavenged from recycling bins, and that (possibly as a result) collected glass recycling in an Oregon-adjacent county in Washington was down 9% after the deposit went up.
I had to laugh at myself, because my first thought was that it's related to the efforts of the swelling numbers of the homeless. That's basically a joke out of thin air mind you, not a "statement," so please don't bother refuting or confirming.
One thing's for sure -- and this was discussed when China first reneged on recycling the plastics: Commingled recycling at the curb has been a disaster. In my opinion, predictably so. I remember being surprised when it first began, to think that it could be economical or efficient to have to separate the streams further downstream. Turns out I was right.
Sorting and separating isn't that hard, and people would've learned and mastered it by now, if they'd been required to do it. Contrary to the hope, if you coddle people they will not show their appreciation by meeting the new, lower minimum expected of them; they will continue to push the bar even lower.
I'll anecdotally contribute in agreement. I live in Portland and put all my returnables at the curb with recycling. Not worth driving to a return center to get $2 a month. The bottles are usually gone by 6am when I wake up.
Some local breweries are moving to reusable bottles that are washed and used many timees before recycling. We're building a washing plant in PDX this year to grow the program.
Seriously. And in Portland we exasperated the issue by limiting garbage to once every 2 weeks. So people throw trash in the recycling containers. And that makes the recycling near useless.
Specifically, the Portland, OR metro area includes Vancouver, WA; they are separated only by a river and two very congested interstates. Additionally, there are recycling centers in the Jantzen Beach region, sandwiched between Portland and Vancouver on the OR side.
> and discovered that others in his neighborhood also reported having their recycling bins rummaged through in pursuit of bottles and cans.
Yea, I'm in Oregon, and this happens to me too. Honestly, who cares? What they are "stealing" (lol) is being recycled. If this senator cared enough, he would take his bottles/cans to the store and get credit for it. The point is, he doesn't care that much, but somehow feels entitled to something he doesn't care about.
The issue is rarely that people go rummaging through the bins. The issue is more often that the people who go rummaging through the bins do so in a way that involves pulling out all the contents, dumping it on the street or curb, and then leaving without cleaning up.
There's a related issue where the residents don't always trust that the salvagers will content themselves solely to collecting redeemable cans.
As an Oregonian, I think the biggest contributor is definitely bumping the redemption value from 5 cents to 10 cents. At that price, it makes it economically viable for the homeless population to spend lots of time going around and gathering every available bottle. In my neighborhood, I even have homeless people digging through my recycling bins every few hours rummaging for bottles to cash in!
As a kid, I earned a considerable amount of money (sometimes $5+ per day) riding my bike around and collecting cans and bottles during the summer. Those bought me a lot of MTG cards and layaway payments on the latest SNES game. Now I just set them alongside the recycling bin for the homeless as well. I feel like the neighborhood kids are really missing out on a lucrative opportunity.
In Copenhagen, many of the public litter bins have a small shelf for donating bottles. I will hold on to a bottle for longer to put it on one of these shelves, rather than in (or beside) the bin.
You make look silly with two giant garbage bags hanging off your bike, but at the end of the day who's holding on to 20 bucks? It felt like a fortune back then, and was an honest hard days work.
That's the biggest problem for me. It was a fortune back then. My family would collect bottles all year and cash them in for a vacation. But back then it was 10c per bottle... 30 years ago. Today, it's still 10c per bottle. With inflation, that's more like 5c per bottle. Couple that with the rise in bottled water and other non-carbonated drinks that don't have deposit on them plus a lot of store brands and specialty bottles that require you to go to multiple stores to return, a whole day of collecting bottles might only net you $5. And then you have to spend another day going back and forth between Family Fare, Kroger, Meijer, Walmart, Target, and maybe even a specialty bottle store.
Even for kids, a lot of times it's not worth it for just a few bucks.
When I was in 5th grade, I spend all of the breaks collecting milk- and lemonade bottles sold by our school cafeteria. If I recall correctly, they had a redemption value of 25 Pfennig (0.25 Deutsche Mark, roughly 0.12 EUR). I stored them in my locker and returned them at the end of the week. I was able to make around 20 DM (10 EUR) per week, or 80 DM per month, sometimes over 100 DM, which was a monstrous amount of money for 10 years old me.
There were a few kids doing this, so you had to be quick and know the locations where many bottles were to be found. The best spots were usually the places where the teenage "cool" kids who considered returning bottles below their dignity were hanging out, and you had to be brave enough to approach them. To this day, I remember the pure joy of finding a motherload of bottles, maybe up to 10 at once, and always leave bottles on the top of garbage cans in the city for the homeless :)
I grew up in Vermont where there was/is a 5 cent deposit on cans and a 10 or 15 cent deposit on larger bottles or liquor bottles. I did dozens of, "bottle drives" where we'd go around and ask houses if we could take their cans to raise money.
If we spent a few hours doing it we'd get a couple hundred dollars easily. But damn I've never smelt anything worse than a blue massive trash barrel filled with beers cans that are all a year or older. Worth about $20 on it's own though.
Is this actually a good thing? In Germany (esp Berlin) homeless people do this a lot, but I've seen them basically empty a whole trash container on the street to get a few bottles. While it's great there is a revenue source for the homeless; I can't help thinking that it's not a great way to do it.
Must cost a fortune to clean up the trash after people have been through them, way more than the few (euro)cents you get back...
When I was in Berlin recently it seemed ubiquitous to set redeemable bottles aside for the homeless to collect, or just hand them to homeless people directly. Seemed like only the tourists were throwing them in the trash. Not to say dumping bins doesn't happen but certaintly didn't seem like a widespread problem -- and how exactly does it cost "a fortune" to clean up a pile of trash in the street? Street cleaners are already on payroll.
In Sweden it works the same. When you are walking down the street and finish your drink, it's common courtesy to not throw it in the trash can, but instead just leave it on the ground right next to the trash can for someone to collect.
They've also basically completely mitigated the fraud aspect of this by having all machines in all grocery stores scan the UPC on the bottle to determine whether it is manufactured in Sweden. The deposit is pretty significant there too, 1 SEK, which is equivalent to about 10 cents right now.
If there is such a problem with homeless people that desperate, then perhaps it is a sign one should do something about helping the homeless.
I grew up in Norway, and while Norway certainly isn't free of homeless people, I never saw this despite a widespread bottle return system (in fact, the Norwegian company Tomra has a majority of the world "reverse vending machine" market, primarily focused on bottle returns).
Norway have had a return rate in the 95%+ range for years in large part because a variety of groups of people see empty bottles as an income source.
I think this to a large extent have also culturally solved the problem: while some people certainly throw their bottles in the bin, there's little reason not to instead put your bottle down next to it, because you know it will get picked up.
You make it sound easy. Homeless is a hard problem: most of those people are mentally ill, and do not trust the helpers. If they can live on their own without help it can well be argued they are happier that way then in a home will professional help. This is a very complex subject that I've only scratched the surface of.
Yes, but there is a significant difference between people "just" being homeless, and people being homeless and so desperate that they cause other problems. One can alleviate their problems in many ways even if one does not manage to remove homelessness.
The 95% return rate has been kept up in more recent times even if the 1-2kr deposit has become less incentive due to price increases as they added a lottery option to all the machines. [1]
So instead of collecting your deposit, you can now click a button to see if you win a price (up to 1 million NOK), and if you lose you donate it to the Red Cross.
I remember as a kid in the 80s collecting bottles at events etc, back when a bottle of Coke was 6kr so the 1 kr deposit made a difference. I feel happy these days to press the donate button though when I am in the country.
The simple solution is to design recycling carts with some kind of for-deposit-item hopper. Here in Portland I just set mine next to the can, since there's no chance they'll go unclaimed.
In Los Angeles, most people put them into a separate bag in their recycling bins. Then the homeless and scavengers come by and just take a single bag out of the bin without causing too much other trouble. They will occasionally dump a bin to get something at the bottom, but it's pretty rare in my experience.
I think it can eventually have some unintended consequences though. A few years back I visited Calgary and saw signs in parking lots warning people not to leave bottles in their car due to the risk of people breaking car windows just to steal bottles for their redemption value. Alberta has a 10 cent deposit for cans and bottles under 1L and 25 cent deposit for bottles over 1L. Hard to believe people would smash car windows for a couple of dollars.
At least in Portland, the window smashers are very like homeless addicts. Many stories abound of people having their window smashed in, coins looted out of the glove box, but things like $400 pair of sunglasses just left to hang out on the dashboard. One of the most frequent posts on Nextdoor here are cars getting looted in front of their houses. (We have lots of homeless scrounging for change.)
And no one asked them to or hired them to do the work. It's like calling someone a street sweeper because they picked up a dime off the sidewalk. Sure it's money in their pocket but it's not exactly a job.
They’re definitely not sanitation workers. On my street the homeless constantly empty full public trash bins all over the sidewalk looking for bottles and cans.
When I visited friends at the University of Michigan in the early 00s, they would purposely leave their doors unlocked on the weekends and let the homeless come through and pick up after their parties with the tacit agreement that if anything of value went missing, the doors would be then locked. win-win
Another Oregonian checking in. I wonder if there is any correlation between rates of homelessness and redemption rate; my biased impression is that homelessness in general has only increased with my time here, as well as the rate at which I see (almost exclusively) homeless or very low income individuals recycling.
I personally will not be bothered redeeming in Oregon, since all cans and bottles have to be manually fed into the reading machine. Coming from California where I can just bring a trashcan full of cans in and get my money, I find the system a complete waste of time.
I separate out my recyclables for the canners and leave them out for whomever wants to put in the effort of standing in front of the coop for an hour.
It's not your imagination. Oregon's homeless population has been increasing several percentage points year over year [1]. It's even worse in California.
This is exactly the scenario in Los Angeles. There is a collective army of bottle and can collectors pulling them from recycle bins and everywhere else. Bins are scoured a dozen times a day; you won't find lone can on the street anywhere.
Don't forget the part where the homeless walk down Dockweiler beach every morning and dump the garbage cans onto the sand to more easily pick through the trash to get at the cans.
Oregonian here: We have had cans intended for redemption stolen from our backyard. They just took the whole bin with cans and walked off. I guess there was probably ~$25 of cans it in.
This happens a lot in SF too. I'm not sure if it actually does anything to promote recycling since the bottles were already in a recycle bin to begin with.
Funny, only 10 states have bottle bills: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon and Hawaii. Delaware had one but dropped it. I thought they were way more popular for some reason.
Redemption rates are all above 50% I guess that's not too bad.
If one thinks about it, it's not especially surprising that the bottle bills are both uncommon and popular.
In order to have a bottle bill, a state needs to tax every bottle, convince grocers to help collect bottles, and operate recycling processors. Thus, the state's population needs to be liberal/blue/neoliberal enough on tax policy, have a strong bread basket with lots of farmers, and care for the environment.
Why do bottle bills tend to get high amounts of participation once enacted? Environmentalism is more popular than folks think. The bigger reason, though, might be that a culture of recycling has become popular. It can be easy to place a bottle into a container on the street, or for a restaurant to collect a bottle on behalf of its patrons, and those unredeemed bottles contribute to the redemption rate.
If the deposit is large enough, then a market for scavenging bottles can form, incentivizing redemption at scale, but this is usually considered a bad thing.
The way it works in Norway is that there is an excise tax on bottles and other drink containers. Every recyclable container you recycle gives you a credit against the excise tax. There is a national return scheme that retailers can opt into to handle the recycling, but in theory they could operate their own. The return scheme in effect costs less than the excise tax.
Shops can decide not to participate, but in that case they sell drinks at the same price as everyone else, but has higher costs per bottle sold. (EDIT: Shops could decide not to participate; apparently that's changed at some point in recent years; it's now compulsory)
That was enough to convinces pretty much every corner store, gas station and supermarket in the country to redeem bottles. Especially because they can do so for store credit, and so it helps drive footfall of people who will tend to spend the money immediately.
The hard sell is getting people to accept it as necessary to get the legal framework in place.
> Why do bottle bills tend to get high amounts of participation once enacted? Environmentalism is more popular than folks think. The bigger reason, though, might be that a culture of recycling has become popular.
Another reason is that the tax punishes those that don't. One wonders what the redemption rate might be if it was 50 cents a bottle? Or if you fined those that don't recycle them?
> Thus, the state's population needs to be liberal/blue/neoliberal enough on tax policy, have a strong bread basket with lots of farmers, and care for the environment.
How are farmers relevant to whether or not a bottle bill is enacted?
Growing up in California, I assumed the bottle deposit system was a federal thing. Moving to North Carolina and seeing people causally throw away glass bottles into the trash was definitely a cultural shock for me.
Head to the midwest. No one wants to run a recycling operation. You'll see people throw away plastics, metals, and glass all the time. Recycle bins are hard to find when you don't live in a city.
People return bottles and cans in Michigan, though, because of the 10 cent deposit and the fact you can return them directly to any store that sells the product. Not having to go to a recycling center is huge. They are generally picked up and, presumably, recycled, by the bottler.
In case people aren't from Michigan and don't understand how this works...
Many stores have automated scanning machines. You feel UNCRUSHED bottles and cans in, a worm drive spins them around while scanning for the barcode. If that can was sold in MI, you get a .10 credit. You just stand there feeding them in at bigger stores. Many of the grocery stores devoted a portion of their cart storage / entry to these machines. It's important to note that they are required to be uncrushed because it's a pain in the ass storing full size empties imo.
They are a pain in the ass though because they are always filling up and/or jamming and then you have to call and wait for staff to come fix it. If you are redeeming a whole cart of bottles you're going to have to call the staff over at least a couples times. They are always in use so you have to wait. The rooms they are in are nasty and sticky. The bar code reader doesn't always work the first time (and sometimes doesn't work at all for some bottles) so you're constantly refeeding them into the machine.
They get a TON of use, so they go out of order frequently.
My grocery store just got brand new ones and they are better than the last ones they had still have problems.
Moved away from MI, but I was not a fan of getting gross old soda on my hands when feeding them into the machines. The .10c is something I'm missing though.
This is how it works in Norway too, and I think it's absolutely essential if you want to make these schemes maximize the redemption rates.
The law that established the excise tax on the bottles has a clause that basically reduces the tax relative to the sellers redemption rate, so the stores have a financial reason to accept the bottles, as the excise tax is higher than the cost of participating in a recycling program.
Problem is there is no market for recycled glass. In my city, at one of the landfills there is a giant pile of glass bottles that just sits out all year.
You might be too far from a glass plant to make it worthwhile, but there's certainly a market for recycled glass. The O-I glass plant my company buys glass here in Oregon from uses 60% of 'cullet' - recycled glass, in their mix.
Likewise. These days I give them to my housekeeper because she likes to redeem them. It adds about $15-25 to what we pay her every 2 weeks. I imagine if she does this with other clients she's making some nice extra cash!
The waste company has people that go through the recycling and pull out all the salvageable bottles and get the deposit themselves, so you can consider it a "donation" to SF Recology or wherever you live.
IMO, the law needs to change. If you don't have a place to drop off bottles/cans within 3 miles, the tax should be removed from items in those areas. It is completely pointless to have an incentive that can only be achieved by driving for 45 minutes.
At this point its simply a tax. I'm pretty sure that the people who collect them from trash cans gets cents on the dollars for the cans and a middle man is making the profit on transportation of the cans.
This is great and all for the environment but as someone who lives in downtown Portland the effectiveness of this program has actually reduced "quality of life" downtown.
Homelessness has been an issue here for a while, but by making it more economically viable to do bottle deposits this program has created mini hubs for the homeless to converge on.
There is a large Target store downtown with bottle deposit machines, there is usually a group of homeless folks who hang out overnight waiting for the store to open to deposit their goods -- and they leave a trail of trash and needles behind. And generally make it unpleasant to shop at the store.
Bottle deposit isn't really a means of addressing homelessness but it is just another factor when considering how chronic Portland's homeless issue is.
Not only is it reducing QoL in downtown...but also the surrounding area. I also work in the Pearl District and I recall my boss (who lives around 15 minutes drive from the office) stating that once in a while homeless people go to his neighborhood and pillage the trash and leaving shopping carts all over the place, which is quite unsettling.
In addition, I'm glad I stay away from the target for can recycling. I think I'll stick with the Whole Paychecks down in the Pearl, even of that POS breaks way too often.
I live in Michigan and I hate the bottle deposits. I would strongly prefer just putting bottles in recycling. Bottle deposit machines break down frequently, the machines fill up, they only take cans sold at the store you bought them from, that part of the store smells bad and is dirty and sticky, and the cans take up a non-trivial amount of space in your home.
I'm a lifelong Oregonian and I agree. Taking bottles back for redemption is a pain. The places stink, there's always a line, and always one or two broken machines. Then you get a whole $10.
I just stick everything in regular recycling.
I would guess homeless people are the only reason it's anywhere near 90%. Everyone I know does curb side recycling.
I think you've identified a point against your argument without realizing it. If we didn't put dollar value on recycling, the recycling wouldn't be performed at the rate it currently is.
Michigan is different however. When you spend half the year surrounded by snow and freezing temps, even the idea of going outside is numbing.
I was living in Michigan and Illinois this last year, and they are light-years away when it comes to interest and availability of recycling process, compared to Oregon.
>When you spend half the year surrounded by snow and freezing temps, even the idea of going outside is numbing
I've seen you make this comment twice in this thread and while you say you've lived in Michigan I think you drastically underestimate the resiliency of the majority of Michiganders. It was negative wind chill recently and now that it's back up to the mid 20s I see tons of people walking around without a coat on. The cold doesn't bother us that much.
I understand the resiliency of Michiganders, my point was about maintaining incentive for the bottle program. If there was no deposit, how many people would collect bottles on the side of the road?
I mean, this is the reality of using a product. Should all the difficult parts and smells be removed, or should you have to experience the downsides as well as the upsides of consuming.
> they only take cans sold at the store you bought them from
That might be the biggest issue. Around here (Finland) the deposit system is universal; most beverage containers are standardized and in the system by default. And the machines accept containers not within the system, they just won't give you money for them, so you don't have to worry accidentally mixing containers with deposit and those without.
As an Oregonian, I hate this system. It's old, archaic and now pointless.
The idea behind it was to increase recycling of cans and bottles, and it did it's job. In the 70s and 80s, it was great to push that for the social good. But it's done it's job, two generations are now recycling more than ever and the coverage for curbside recycling is very high in Oregon.
But the redemption rate has plummeted in the last decade! Of course it has, people don't want to have the hassle of taking cans into a location, wasting time putting each one in the machine, and getting a couple bucks back. So they were forgoing the 5 cents and just putting it in the curbside bin. News flash - the cans in the curbside bin didn't count toward redemption rates! Oregon also made it so stores didn't have to take redemptions anymore and opened redemption centers that aren't very conveniently location for most of the state. So the rate fell - and now they have increased the rate to get people to take the cans in again. Eventually the rate is going to fall AGAIN, and not because people aren't recycling the cans, they just aren't taking them in the redemption centers.
The system is now worthless and just kept going because. Directly north of us, Washington doesn't have a can or bottle redemption system and there aren't cans and bottles everywhere - people just put them in the curbside bins like everything else.
As one datapoint, in Finland the deposit system works fairly well as far as I understand. It helps that most beverage containers are now plastic or aluminum instead of heavy glass that's a bitch to drag into a store. I at least just dump glass bottles into the glass recycling bin, deposit or not.
Bottles and cans with deposit that are thrown into curb-side mixed-waste bins (or just on the ground) are usually very quickly collected by people looking for extra cash (on summer weekends this can net you quite a lot!) In some places I've seen small separate can receptables attached to garbage bins that can hold a stack of cans so that it's easy for someone to come grab them without having to delve into the garbage bin proper, which I find a very good idea.
The article goes to pains to deride curbside recycling, but at the same time, curbside recycling means not wasting resources and time carrying cans to the nearest recycling center, not dealing with the awful experience that is the average recycling center, and not dealing with the stores to get the resulting small change. How much gas is used driving cans and bottles to the store? I just throw cans into the curbside recycling bin along with all the other recycling, and live with the 10 cent waste as yet another tax.
So my question is, how much of the material they are taking is getting to recyclers? None of the articles linked within the original give a number. They do highlight that curbside pickup of recyclables is pretty much a dead end but that has been suspected for a long time.
when the public is rewarded for returning a usable product, usable in the sense it is worth more to recyclers, they apparently do it quite often. the reward is instant or tangible whereas curb side is mostly forget about it which in turns leads to it not being valuable down stream. being instant furthers participation. it is a good lesson to take to other states looking on how to implement a winning system.
so curbside, sounds good, feels good, doesn't really amount to something.
personal drop off with instant judgment and payout works better
I'm not sure on what portion goes to recyclers, but I have been to the plant that processes all these return bottles, and I suspect that a fairly high percent is going through that facility. It's a 24/7 operation with sophisticated grinding, washing, and sorting equipment, producing clean flake for use by bottle manufacturers.
The owners say demand has been very strong for the finished product.
In Denmark, the system says the collected bottles and cans are of good enough quality to be re-made into food containers:
> The advantage of this system is that the material can continue to have adequate quality to be used again for food. Strict health regulations cover the aluminium, plastic and glass we drink from.
> This is why aluminium from used beer cans may solely be used for new beer cans if it has not been mixed with other aluminium items such as empty paint cans. Similarly, glass bottles cannot be recycled into new bottles containing soft drinks if the glass has been mixed with waste glass from light bulbs, for example.
> When we send plastic, glass and aluminium from bottles and cans for processing, the material goes exclusively to facilities and companies that are approved to manufacture food packaging. We inspect regularly to ensure that the requirements are met.
> A row of sparkling clean reverse vending machines greet customers
Yeah, these won't stay "sparkling clean" for long. I used to make an effort to redeem bottle deposits: I'd pull up in my truck and attempt to unload everything I've accumulated over the preceding couple of weeks. Eventually I got tired of jostling into position in front of the machine, arguing with the homeless, and getting into fights over who gets to go first. The sorts of people who redeem bottle deposits in NYC do a very good job at scaring away regular folks who might want to do the same.
Also, there's no incentive to keep them clean - people will come in no matter what condition the place is in. They often end up smelling like stale beer and corn syrup.
Maybe once in the past year have I managed to have someone buy my cans and bottles for basically nothing. Probably 80 percent of the people redeeming where I go are homeless, so it's no mystery to me why they're homeless.
That’s assuming they even work. Best bet is to go to a Costco, they at least keep it mostly clean and functional. Although you then have to stand in the returns line to get your money or argue with a cashier that they have to redeem the slip.
My area has a problem with contaminated material collected for recycling. It's so bad there is an active marketing campaign urging users not to recycle unless they're absolutely certain the material is recyclable. I witnessed a recycling collection truck dump its entire load at the landfill, and an employee mentioned its a regular occurrence. I'm fortunate that I have great trash collection. I can dispose of up to 6 yards per week. Although my area has one of the lowest recycling rates of the country.
We're doing slightly better on the redemption rate here in Michigan though it has slipped in the past several years. Since our economy has revived I anecdotally see fewer people out collecting bottles from the side of the road.
I was just living in Michigan and I have to say, recycling was always an afterthought to people I met. Likewise, your state is covered in snow and freezing for half the year. This are big challenges for anyone.
Right after the snow thaws is a great time to go collecting bottles. Plenty of people throw them out of their car and they get covered in snow, so when the snow thaws there is a ton of bottles all along the road.
Similar in Germany. 2005 about 10% of bottles with deposit weren't returned, 2012 about 5%. Deposit is between 8 Euro cent (0.09 USD) and 25 Euro cent (0.28 USD). Source in German https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfandschlupf
I'm not sure if this is a statewide thing or what but in Eugene we have a "BottleDrop" facility- it's a big warehouse with a storefront where you can take individual bottles/cans for refund, or you can bag them up in bulk and drop them off and they process them for you, and you get a credit applied to your account which you can cash out at most of the local grocery stores.
I always do the bulk option, you can just drop bags off at a drive-up location. They charge a small percentage to handle it for you but it's worth it to me to have someone else handle it.
I used to put my bottles and cans curbside. Most of the folks picking them up are, I'm sure, as honest as I am or even more so. They just need another source of income.
On the other hand, we and the neighbors have had things disappear. People have prowlers in their back yards "looking for cans". So it seemed like a good idea to stop setting them out or even having them visible.
What I do now: you can buy bags and bar code labels for about $.10/pair. When a bag is full of recyclables, you tie it off, put your label on it, and drop it off at one of the BottleDrop centers.
There's two kinds: one where they have people working there and one where they don't (the "Express" versions). At the Express places, they truck the bags to somewhere else where they're counted. They charge $.40/bag to count them.
So for $.50, or 5 bottles, I can have someone else count them instead of standing on the sticky, stinky floor to shove in bottles one at a time. It's about 8-10%, assuming you can get 50-60 bottles and cans in a bag.
There are also grocery stores where they let you drop off your empties and they count them and give the deposit to a specified charity.
I hate to be so cynical but is this a submarine article for BottleDrop? I thought of it it because (ironically) I was interested and paid a visit to their website.
Here's a recent article about the problem: "Oregon senator to introduce bill to thwart return of bottles, cans bought in Washington: She says grocery stores ‘drowning’ in out-of-state containers"
https://www.columbian.com/news/2018/dec/04/oregon-senator-to...
Has anyone seen more exact numbers that would either support or refute this?