Post by Chris ElvidgeI remember (back in the good old days) every bottle sold had a deposit
on it (but not milk bottles?). About 3d IIRC.
Bottles were returned to the retailer, who then returned them to the
wholesaler/supplier to be washed and reused.
When aluminum cans and plastic bottles came to replace the traditional
glass bottles, one of the selling points (to the manufacturers) was
that they were much lighter and took up less space, greatly reducing
costs of manufacturing and distribution, but not far behind that was
"no need to accept, wash, store, and sterilize returns", with or
without a deposit. There have been a number of health scares
regarding contaminated or improperly sealed food packaging, so the
classic milk bottle with a non-tamper-evident lid was an easy target
for the petroleum industry.
Several states[1] have had a "bottle bill" since the 1970s. The
amount of the deposit varies, as does the beverages to which it
applies. Most common is a 5-cent deposit on bottles used for
pressurized carbonated beverages -- deposits on alcoholic beverages,
juice, milk, and bottled water are fiercely opposed by the industry
and have only been enacted in a few states. Any retailer selling
products covered by the bottle bill is required to both collect the
deposit and accept returns (or arrange with another location nearby to
accept the returns). Here in Massachusetts, the bottlers and
distributors are responsible for netting out the differences among
retailers, with any unclaimed net deposits escheated to the state; the
retailers and distributors also collect a handling fee for each bottle
or can handled, which is bundled into the retail price separately from
the consumer-visible deposit.
There are still dairies supplying milk in traditional glass bottles
(now with tamper-evident seals), and they typically charge their own
private deposits, not part of the mandatory state deposit scheme --
the one around here is $3 per bottle.
Post by Chris ElvidgeBut then came recycling - crush the bottles, melt and re-manufacture.
Cheaper for the supplier(?) but not as eco-friendly.
Most retailers here use the Envipco Redeemer brand bottle and can
acceptor to automate payment of deposits: a bank of these machines can
be located outside of the main store footprint, one for each type of
returnable, so homeless people don't bring the bottles they fished out
of the trash inside. (When I was a teenager and worked in a
supermarket, these machines did not exist yet, so in the Front End we
had a "bottle room" where a clerk would have to manually count the
returned bottles, store them for pickup by the distributor, and write
out a refund slip to the customer.) The automatic devices quickly
scan the UPC on the bottle, check against a database of SKUs sold by
the distributors servicing that store, and shred or crush the accepted
ones to save space. All the different distributors' packages are
mixed together in the bins, so the machines have to keep track in some
auditable way of how many of each company's bottles were reduced to
bits.
Many people don't bother to return their deposit-paid bottles for a
refund, since the deposit is worth much less in inflated modern
dollars than it was in the 1970s when first enacted, and instead put
them into their municipal recycling. Homeless people root through
curbside bins looking for returnable bottles, which some cities
prosecute as theft, because the proceeds from "broken" deposits fund
municipal recycling programs.[2] By contrast, when the bottle bills
were first introduced, it was considered a benefit that those same
homeless people would pick up roadside litter for much less reward
than you'd have to pay a public employee to do it.
When I was a Boy Scout, we would regularly do "bottle drives" as
fund-raisers: our parents would drive us around to different
neighborhoods, where we'd knock on doors and ask people to donate
their returnable bottles and cans, which we'd then drive to a big
redemption center that would redeem them in bulk. At a mere five
cents each, such a fundraiser probably wouldn't even pay for itself
today in terms of the adult chaperones' time -- it would be cheaper to
just write a check -- never mind the issue of people not actually
segregating their returnables.
-GAWollman
[1] According to a bottle I checked: Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont,
Connecticut, New York, Iowa, Hawaii, Michigan, Oregon, and California.
Programs in California and Connecticut are weird and work differently
from how I describe.
[2] A returnable bottle or can is a bearer instrument, so the town
recycling contractor is as entitled to get a deposit refund as anyone
else in possession of such containers, and the contract is written
with an assumption of how much revenue will be collected in this way.
--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
***@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)