Any info on how successful the redemption centers are in California?

It seems really counterintuitive to me to do away with retailers' role.

Redemption centers in California do not work well, and will not work in Oregon unless someone is willing to foot the cost of making them available in ALL areas of Oregon, including Fields. If you don't know where Fields is, look it up.

Even though California is much more urban in nature than is Oregon, even there finding a redemption center requires an extra trip. Imagine the difficulty of finding one in Eastern Oregon, or along the Oregon Coast.

Including water bottles, (who is dumb enough to buy water at the store?) and other beverage bottles makes sense. Raising the deposit amount makes sense, the bottlers will love it for the 25% that are not returned.

Let Califonia keep its CRV tax on bottles that can not be reasonably returned while making that next purchase.

Oregon led the way with a good program, adding the new generation of bottles is a good idea, lets stay in the lead and avoid following the loser.

Would it be practical or fair to allow people to take any redeemable bottle back to any retailer? Currently many retailers only accept back bottles they sold. If you shop at multiple stores it gets difficult to keep track of--especially at the stores that have return systems that seem designed to discourage you from bringing back the bottles. I have to admit I don't always take the time to make returns, especially if I only shop at a store once in a while--I simply have no space to let bottles sit around for weeks and making a special trip in my car just to return a couple of bottles seems to miss the point.

Fred Meyer and Safeway in Portland both have excellent, easy-to-use systems in place, by the way. Commend them if you get the chance.

Redemption centers: Bad Increased deposit: Bad More containers: Very good and long overdue

who has time to return dozens of bottles to redemption centers? forget time, not everyone even has the ability (taking those bottles on the bus/your bike? not likey)?

how about this:

increase container types. raise the deposit.

more container * higher deposit = more revenue:

use the increased revenue to allow customers to mix bottles, cans, and paper in one large container.

let redemption centers be voluntary. if the deposit is high enough, a market should develop, and they redeemers can be reimbursed from the revenue from all the bottles that are never returned.

Keep the recycling with the retailers. Increase the deposit to 12 cents, but only give back a dime when the bottles are returned. Let the retailers pocket the extra two cents. Fred Meyer has several thousand transactions a day involving bottles and the extra two pennies per bottle will pay for the labor, machines and space.

The higher deposit might also prompt a consumer switch to larger bottles rather than six-packs, and save some glass.

Interesting this is a Senate bill, not a House bill.

most retailers also set a limit on how much of a refund you can get in, say, one day. obstensibly to keep their costs down, but all it really does is screw homeless people (and the occasional college kid).

how does that work? do the retailers get reimbursed for the amount of cans/bottles they refund on?

if so, why don't they take whatever they get rather than only what they sell?

I like Gil's idea of giving some cut to the retailers. I don't know what the actual costs (or profits?) are for retailers in handling transactions, but I assume there's some cost. Anyone know?

The Wild Oats that used to be near my house used to take any bottles you brought in, but they didn't have any automated bins--all the transactions were hand-counted by an employee, who as often as not had to wash up afterwards. If you brought in more than a six-pack or two, it would take a couple of minutes for a paid employee to handle your returns.

The same wouldn't be true for larger stores, but small grocers or convenience shops with only one employee working at a time are probably not as likely to be able to set up an efficient processing system. On the face of it, that seems to make it less likely that brands carried only by small shops are getting recycled, or at least that there is less incentive for small shops to encourage recycling.

A comprehensive review of the system might include a review of the "one size fits all" approach and put in some flexibility for smaller retailers. Giving them a cut of the returns might be a good idea.

The redemption system needs to better accommodate the homeless and otherwise challenged folks that gather up bottles and cans from the streets and from curbside recycling bins. I don't blame Freddies or Safeway for not wanting an endless parade of odd looking (and odd smelling) folks in their stores redeeming bottles, but at 10 cents a can I don't expect my neighbor is going to fire up his Hummer to redeem his empty microbrew bottles, so the homeless are doing us a valuable service.

If wine bottles are included, which is fine with me, should not OLCC hard liquor bottles also be included? Not sure I see the distinction from an environmental point of view.

I agree with BlueNote -- some accommodation should be made for the homeless folks who provide a valuable public service by ferreting out every last redemption-worthy container, anywhere, and returning it for a deposit.

I also question why it's not reasonable to make the deposit 25 cents on every container, at a minimum. And index it to inflation at 5-cent increments, such that it would go up to 30 cents a container when inflation pushed prices up past the 27.6 cent-per-container mark. And perhaps double it on extra-large containers (anything over, say, 500ml would be fifty cents).

This would ensure that even more containers stayed out of the landfill, and it would definitely more accurately reflect the true cost of recycling or not recycling containers.

As for stores vs. centers -- in California, the bottle deposit is negligible, and pretty much NOBODY collects bottles & cans to turn in except the bums (excuse me, street people). Real residents just don't do it. Maybe this is because the collection centers are generally located at the county dump, one per county, generally in an inaccessible location. Maybe it's because the cost per container is so low that you actually have to be a bum with no other income, and three full shopping carts full of containers, to make it worth your while. I'd highly recommend against adopting this system. Stick with the grocery store system, and find a way to make it work such that any grocery store can accept any container. Maybe all deposit money gets funneled back to a central fund, then distributed based on which containers are turned back in where. The uncollected cash could then be used by the central fund to... implement the program, pay for roadside/beach/river cleanups, (ala SOLV), etc.

Finally, distributors have no business keeping the deposit when bottles aren't turned in. This needs to be fixed. See the above paragraph for how.

I think you need to leave responsbility for collecting containers with the retailers. But you could allow them to either take them back or identify a redemption center located within a half mile or some other reasonable distance.

There needs to be a way for the stores - who actually get most of the burden - to get the money from the non-returns. Giving that to the distributors makes no sense at all.

I agree that $.25 would be a more reasonable deposit and would really lead to an increase in returns. Unfortunately I think it might hurt the homeless folks. Right now a lot of people are like Jeff Frane - they just stick their bottles out on the curb and let someone grab them. When a 6 pack brings a $1.50, instead of $.30, that would change.

Redemption centers with a $.10 deposit would be a disaster. Stuff would just go into the ditch.

Well put, T.A. Barnhart.

To answer Bert S, California redemption centers are a vanishing breed. I can't remember the last time I saw one. Most people do curbside recycling and don't even bother with the redemption value, which currently is 5 cents. (It started out as only 2 cents in the mid 1980s.) Curbside recycling is so much more convenient that nobody here cares about losing 5 cents a can.

California's bottle bill is a joke. I lived in Oregon when it first enacted a bottle bill and in California when we first enacted a bottle bill. Oregon's is vastly superior.

there are lots of good ideas here, but it almost seems like we're losing sight of the real goal, which is to increase recycling. the most effective thing we could do to increase recycling would be to stop requiring sorting--everything in one bin. forget a bin... a can, that you can roll down to the curb, rather than having to bend over and lift 2-3 often heavy bins.

what would this take? i don't know, but down in cali they do it, and in SF they recycle almost 20% more of their trash than us.

simplicity + convenience = success.

The bottle bill is great for getting litter off the streets, but I am not so sure it contributes greatly to recycling per se. Those statistics about percentage of the waste stream being recycled can be misleading. Ten years ago I had a contact who worked for a large waste disposal company and he told me that his company made a daily decision based on market price as to whether it was cost effective to sell a particular commodity (brown glass, for example) to a processor to be melted down or whether they would just haul it to their landfill for disposal. So while we consumers were busily sorting our trash and feeling good about saving the environment, the disposal company may or may not have actually recycled what we put at the curb.

Does Oregon have any laws that require materials collected through bottle redemptions or curbside recycling bins to actually be recycled, or is that decision still left to the waste disposal contractor(s)? If the contractor can still control that decision based on market factors, it seems like the legislature might want to look at that, although the cost to the consumer might be significant if we force the disposal contractors to reprocess a commodity for which there is no economic demand, since presumably they would have to raise their rates to cover their losses on the forced reprocessing of unmarketable commodities.

let's take the lead on this and make it a quarter! that ought to change the equation some. lead, Oregon, lead!

Fred Meyer moved their bottle return operations out into their parking lots years ago (and automated them). What's to stop any store from operating a "redemption center" in their parking lot? Many stores now have Goodwill Industries collection centers in their lots. Bottle redemption could become a profitable sideline for Goodwill. Their collection center attendants now sit on their butts between carloads of old clothes and toys (sometimes for hours at a time when business is slow).

Let's go for what's really needed -- $0.25 per small container, $0.50 per large container, with 20% retained by the retailer. They can either operate the "redemption center" in their parking lot themselves or use that 20% to contract with Goodwill or another enterprise to operate it (lots of room for small-time entrepreneurs here and part-time work for folks who need it).

And require all redemption centers to accept all deposit containers.

And, BTW, maybe this could help get rid of the system currently in use where a contractor picks up returned containers from the retailer and pays them by the (huge) bag based on some calculation of how many aluminum cans it takes to fill one of those bags.

This system makes retailers reluctant to accept aluminum cans that are crushed or flattened. They pay out a nickel to the person who returns it, but it takes up only 1/4 to 1/3 the space of an intact can. Thus the huge bags hold more cans, but the retailer still gets paid as if the bags held all intact cans. Retailers/redemption center operators should be paid by the container, not by the giant bag.

State law does not allow them to refuse to accept flattened cans unless they are filthy or have some non-beverage contents, but I have had to argue with several Fred Meyer clerks and assistant managers about this issue. So, a homeless person who wants to sell his cans with no hassle has to avoid flattening them to save room in his collection vehicle.

State law does allow retailers to refuse to accept more than 72 containers per day from an individual. The rule is there to keep someone from saving up his and all his neighbors' cans for a year or two then backing a large vanload of containers up to a store and demanding the deposits. But it can be used to discourage less desirable folks from showing up with 100 or 200 cans at once.