Massachusetts has a five-cent deposit. Any store that sells a product with a deposit has to be able to take that empty container back and refund the deposit.
There are machines that I have to feed one can at a time, and they scan the barcode and determine if it’s a product they sell. If it is, the machine crushes the can and prints out a ticket you can redeem at the register. You could put different barcodes on the cans sold in different states, but I don’t know if they do.
The crushing part is also where the scam comes in, I think. The store owners have to return the cans to the state, or some authorized receiving facility. The cans are already crushed, so that part goes by weight. They probably use the stores’ records to find out how many cans were sold, weigh the cans they bring back, and credit or debit the store based on the difference. It sounds like the scammers were colluding with some store owners to get cans into the recycle stream but bypassing that barcode check. Hell, if they fed enough cans into the machines, one-by-one, to earn $500,000, they’ve already served their time.
There was one thing I thought was interesting in the article:
How can a deposit fund have proceeds? Obviously some cans will be bought, the deposit paid, and never redeemed. But does the state really want that to happen, and budget for it? Or do the proceeds come from investing all those millions of dimes during the time they are in the state’s coffers?
Tose familiar with this can add: redeeming cans is a pain in the ass! Where I live (in MA) the redemption centers are in dirty , dangerous areas. If you go to where the stuff is sold, you are confronted (usually) by broken redeeming machines (the ones that crush bottles and cans). I’ve had to wait while bum (who smelled terrible) sat feeding in cans from his stolen shopping basket cart. I wish you could stomp the cans at home and just turn them in -instead of having trucks transport empty cans-buring energy while hauling air!
Why? The government was in no way involved - this was purely deposits charged by the Coca-Cola company, and as far as I’m aware, I had no contract with them to return the bottles to the point of origin. The bottles themselves were worth ten cents each - smashing the bottles would have cost the local company eight cents also, but would certainly not be illegal.
The bottles had place of origin stamped on them and many came from outside Massachusetts.
We also never misrepresented the origin of the bottles when we sold them.
I suppose paying off the people at the plant was unethical (though they suggested it, since there were union issues) but I can’t see it was illegal. I’m sure that the Boston Coke guy would have brought up something if there was any law against what we did. He threatened not delivering to the college an more, but I suspect we were just too good customers to resist.
If the government was doing the redeeming, then it would have no doubt been illegal.
Around here we pay some sort of deposit, I think, included in the price, then put them out in recycling to be stolen by people who come around at night to grab them. I suspect it is better now that all our recycling gets combined in one big can, as opposed to a little bin for cans and bottles.
I know you can redeem them but I know of no one who actually does. There are limited sites, no machines, and I think you have to bring in a lot.
The reason I brought up the printed refund is because that’s where the fraud comes in. Regardless of the particulars, as soon as you try to palm off a non-MI can as a MI can you are attempting fraud.
They didn’t obscure the markings because the markings weren’t there. They simply crushed the cans and bundled them, in a way that I assume cans are naturally handled in the merchant-to-recycler link. Imagine that they sold 50lb bags of crushed non-MI cans at a discount to other retailers. They were counterfeiting the unit of the “weighed bag of cans”. It’s most certain that when a retailer cashes in a bag by weight, they have to sign something at some point along the line saying the cans were all MI cans.
Where does this differ from them slipping some random aluminum scrap in the crusher as well?
If you look at most drink cans and bottles, you’ll find that deposits for all states that require them are listed, even if they are sold in a state without deposits. When I lived in Northern Indiana, twenty minutes from the Michigan state line, it wasn’t uncommon for the folks who commuted from Michigan to scour the trash cans in the break rooms for empties to take home for the ten cent deposit. No deposit was ever paid on those cans, thus, no money in the state deposit fund from them.
My WAG is, that the businessmen arrested had a set up with some small recycling centers in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and/or Wisconsin and paid more than they were worth on the aluminum market but less than the dime deposit they got in Michigan. If they profited even two cents a can, volume is enough to make some serious bucks.
Right, and what they did, technically, was illegal. Was it financially worth the state’s time and money to prosecute $3.95 worth of illegal deposit returns? No, probably not, unless they were looking to make an example of them. Was it logistically practical to prove that your co-workers had gotten the cans from Indiana and not Michigan? Probably not. Just like it’s not always worth busting someone with an eighth of weed, but you can be darn sure the guy with a pound of it is going in front of a judge. Both are still illegal, though.
Was it? Were the deposits mandated by law as they are in Michigan, where the collection and the refunds of the deposits are done by merchants at the requirement of the state government?
You are correct sir!
I should have said something like “you could be setting up someone to potentially be accused of fraud”. Best to just give the bottles to the party store for no refund and let the retailer deal with Pepsi or Bud.