I’m also in Oregon. I don’t know what a “recycling cart” is but we have a bottle redemption center locally. You can either purchase a roll of special bags that you then fill and return to the center where they count it and apply the deposit to your personal account or you can take your bottles inside the center, run them through the counting machine, and get your deposit right then. If you have them do the counting and request a special voucher at the redemption machine (looks and works like an ATM), you get 20% above the regular redemption value – but its only a store credit, not cash.
Yup. My Boy Scout troop does bottle drives. We advertise heavily on Facebook, Nextdoor, and local bulletin boards then take a trailer to a designated parking lot and wait for people to bring cans in. Last time we did that we got 167 bags of cans and bottles for about $600 in refunds. Took about 3 hours. All those bags get taken to the above mentioned redemption center and they do the pony work and send us a check when its all done. Pretty easy.
Our town doesn’t offer recycling. We’ve tried taking cans/bottles to neighboring towns, but they won’t take it.
Our town had a recycling trailer for a few months that took cans/bottles/cardboard, but when local restaurants began dumping their cans and bottles it filled too quickly and recycling ended.
Oregon has had what is know as the Oregon Bottle Bill since 1971. If your store sells beer, pop, or anything else with a recycling deposit and your store is under 5000 sq ft you must accept the returns and pay the deposit. You sold it, you take it back and pay. If your store is over 5000 sq ft and you sell these types of returnable products you have to take back any similar products, even if your store doesn’t sell that particular item. Could be a brand that you don’t sell, you have to take back the empties and pay.
So basically each and every store that sells these products is a return/recycling center.
What kinds of beverage containers must stores accept?
Retailers that are 5,000 or more square feet in size that accept containers (see How
many containers must stores accept each day?) must accept containers for all
brands and sizes for each kind of beverage they sell. There are five kinds of beverages
covered under the Bottle Bill:
Waters
Carbonated beverages
All other non-alcoholic beverages (excluding infant formula, liquid meal
replacements, and dairy or plant-based milk if milk is listed as first ingredient)
Alcoholic beverages, including hard seltzer (excluding distilled liquor and wine)
Beverages containing marijuana or hemp
If a store 5,000 or more square feet sells any beverage in one of these categories, it
must accept empties for all brands and sizes of beverages in that category even if they
don’t sell those specific brands or sizes. For example, if a store sells sports drinks, it
must accept empty containers for every beverage in the “other non-alcoholic beverages”
category, which includes juice, tea, coffee, smoothies, mixers, etc., even if it’s another
store’s brand.
Retailers under 5,000 square feet may refuse to accept containers if they don’t sell that
brand or size. If a store sells a brand or size, they must accept the empty container
even if the beverage was purchased at another store.
I believe that Oregon stoes in a BottleDrop redemption center zone don’t need to take returns. I remember the machines being pulled out and receiving a notice from my local grocery store but I didn’t retain it. I could be wrong; I’ll check next time I shop.
MA has bottle and can return machines at every supermarket as well. If your state doesn’t have a bottle deposit law I can’t imagine they’d have bottle return machines at point of sale.
Here is an earlier one - and in this case my post is my cite.
When I was at MIT we got deliveries of cases of 16 oz. Coke bottles - glass - from the Coke bottling plant across the Charles. My sophomore year, 1970, the Coke drivers went on strike and we all had a few cases each of empties.
Now the bottle deposit in Boston was 2 cents, and being from NY I knew it was five cents there. So I suggested, in jest, to a friend that we could make a fortune driving the bottles to NY. He lived in Philadelphia, so if we did it before a holiday we’d get transportation included.
We went around campus and collected bottles. We had 216 cases of bottles by the time we were done. We offered to sell the bottles (which were worth way more than two cents) to the Coke plant in Boston at a premium. They got very upset, and threatened to cut us off. (They didn’t.) So, we rented a truck, loaded the cases into it, and drove to NY. I must say that driving a heavy truck gives you confidence on the streets of Manhattan.
We got to the Coke plant on 34th street on the East River, and they wouldn’t take the bottles. But my friend, who was more socially adept than me, managed to pay off the foreman and the shop steward. (The union guys had to unload, of course.) My friend became a lawyer. Natch.
We got our money, I drove my friend to the train station, and I returned the truck and went on home.
I know about but have never seen the Seinfeld episode, but this was long before it.
As for the main point, living in California I’ve never seen a return station either. We put it in our recycle bins where at one point people had a business driving around on garbage night taking them. I think Covid may have stopped that.
Ah. I’m in Douglas County where the locals think that “recycling” is Democrat socialism code for grooming or… something. They nixed it at the county level when Trump took office because Reasons and never really brought it back. There are recycling trucks that go around and pick up the very few blue boxes of recycling people set up (and who pay a significant fee to have collected) but the recyclables just get dumped in the landfill with everything else. Nothing like small-town grift…
Locals who are hip to the county’s evil ways and care enough to actually recycle drive up to Cottage Grove to dump their recyclables.
I think is correct. In Roseburg most of the stores that sell beverages don’t take returns and customers are instructed to go the bottle drop redemption center. Outlying towns (Sutherlin, Winston) have no such restrictions. I have no idea what the zone is though – maybe everything in a 2 mile radius of the center won’t take returns? That seems about right.
That’s the situation for me, when I haul our trash to the township’s recycling center. Originally we had to separate plastics, paper, metal, and glass. But as the market dried up for recycling those materials, it all goes into one ‘recycle dumpster’ which gets disposed of in the landfill with the non recyclables. Only aluminum has recycle value for us here, and even that’s spotty as to whether the site takes it separately or has us dump it in with the other ‘recyclables’. SMH
We have them in Michigan, and for many years I took my empty beer bottles back for recycling. It was an unpleasant affair. Load your empties in your car trunk for the trip the store, and be careful to arrange/secure them so they don’t tip over and spill any liquid in your trunk. Park at the store, find a cart, transfer your bottles. Go to the back of the store, where they hide the bottle return area. Feed your bottles in one at a time, the machine reads the bar code to determine if it’s eligible for a 10-cent deposit refund, and accepts/rejects it accordingly. Sometimes it rejects bottles you definitely bought at this store, so you hold onto those. Half the time the conveyor belt that moves the bottles into the machine is gummed up with dried soda/beer because a lot of slobs don’t rinse out their cans and bottles. Even if the conveyor belt works properly, the machines and the area around them stink of fermented soda and beer. When you’re done, the machine doesn’t give you cash - it prints a receipt that you then take to the customer service counter or checkout counter, and they give you cash. This is also where you can turn over eligible bottles that the machine wrongly rejected.
When the pandemic arrived in March 2020, my wife and I started getting our groceries delivered, and I stopped bringing bottles to those machines. They piled up in our basement for a while, and then I just said fuckit and started putting them in our curbside recycling bin with the rest of our household recyclables. The pandemic has eased up, and we’re occasionally going into grocery stores, but I’m still putting my bottles on the curb. Yep, I’m forfeiting ten cents a bottle, so maybe thirty cents a week. I’ll get by somehow.
You sound like me. In my previous house, we only had tiny recycling containers, so I filled the household trash with empty Labatt Blue cans (this is actually illegal). In my current house we have huge recycling containers for automated dumping, so I’ll put empties in it instead. I don’t have as many empties these days, since I pretty much stopped drinking beer.
I like to tell Ohio people that it’s fine to bring all of their empties into Michigan; they’re simply getting my credit that I’m throwing away. That’s a moral decision for Ohioians, though, because my permission doesn’t make it legal.
Why do you find it hard to believe? They only collect a deposit in a handful of states, literally 10. MA and ME both do, and there aren’t any machines even in NH towns just over the state borders because we don’t collect them for a deposit. I haven’t seen one of those machines in person since we left MA in 1997.
Yeah, I have started trying to buy more containered substances from retailers who will actually take back and reuse the container. So far I’ve succeeded with milk, juice and beer in glass bottles and farmers’-market mushrooms in plastic boxes.
A local hardware store now sells various bulk cleaning liquids by the ounce without containers, so I can fill up my OWN bottles for multiple repeat uses. That’s the way to do it!
(Flashing back to a small town in France’s Perigord region where the annual vendange or grape harvest resulted in a huge barrel of local red wine placed in the convenience store where you could similarly fill up your own bottle(s). Three euros a liter! )
For other carbonated beverages I try to stick to the aluminum cans, sux about the dioxins though.
Thanks! It seems to me like a pathetically small drop in the bucket (even though I forgot to include raw honey where the beekeepers I know will also take back and reuse glass jars). But I will keep trying to make progress!
(Another surprisingly little-known fact is that the plastic-film produce bags you rip off a roll at the grocery store can also be reused multiple times, after being rinsed out and hung to dry if necessary. Since I am taking my cloth bags to the store anyway, it’s no trouble just to grab a handful of used produce bags and take them along too. I have never had a clerk complain about my not using new plastic bags for my produce, though I do get a funny look sometimes if the clear plastic bag I put the cucumbers in has a bread label on it because it originally contained a loaf of bread. )
actually I reuse the produce bags to wrap food I put in freezer, and I use them as “insulation” against mold by wrapping them over jaws and stuffing surplus into jars before placing lid on jar–this keeps my pasta sauce, and other cans, like half used corned beef hash, from going bad too soon.
I fully support the recycled bottle idea because the industry can clean a lot of bottles using very little water or water efficient machines. In my personal estimation though, washing a plastic-film bag has higher carbon footprint than maybe using a new film. Water (or water pumped to our houses) constitutes about 5% of our carbon footprint (it has to be pumped out of the ground or a river, it has to be treated with chemicals, filtered, pumped again to our homes, the sewage from our homes have to be collected, cleaned and pumped again.)
The waste industry in the US (it is a monopoly of sorts) has resisted waste to power installations because it is capital intensive. But increasingly, they see the value of gasifying/combusting waste plastic and biomass and capturing the resulting CO2. I think we instead of washing plastic films, we should write to our politicians and local districts to make waste to energy clean energy plants.
While reducing the consumption of Plastic, it is also prudent that we realize that plastics are not going away. They serve a useful purpose, will help with Climate change - and we need to find a good way of treating them at the end of their life. Combusting/ Gasifying them, making power while capturing the resulting CO2 will go a long way.
Please do not waste your time in recycling plastics; any chemist worth their salt will tell you that modern day plastics are not meant for recycling. At best - they can be downcycled maybe once.
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