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.
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%.