I’m looking at a bottle of Mountain Dew that I’ve just finished and noticed that on the side, it has prices for the recycle value of the bottle for 9 states. Most are 5 cents, but for some reason Michigan is 10 cents. California is listed as “CRV”. Why the difference in price for Michigan? And what of the prices in the unlisted states? And what does “CRV” stand for?
I remember a Seinfeld episode where Kramer and Newman tries a scheme to take bottles from New York to recycle them in Michigan, but they never explained why there is a difference.
It’s probably arbitrary, passed as a law by the state. It is just an incentive for you to return the bottle, and it is somewhat subjective as to how the high the value should be to provide an adequate incentive.
Not sure why you refer to the “recycle value.” This amount is unrelated to the actual value of the bottle. Long before recycling was in the public vocabulary, people returned bottles for the deposit, to be reused.
Each state sets it own deposit and refund amount for cans and bottles. Most states are 5 cents, Michigan decided 10 cents would work better. Since printing/stamping the deposit & refund amount individually for every state would be in a pain in the ass for the manufacturers, they just put it on all the containers for deposit states. Note that Michigan is attempting to make it illegal to perform the Kramer/Newman scheme of importing containers to get the larger refund.
Just to add a bit: CRV stands for “California Redemption Value”, “California Refund Value”, “Cash Return Value”, or one of several other things depending on both the context and who you ask.
Payout is a nickel for cans or bottles under 24 ounces and a dime for 24 ounce or larger bottles.
I don’t know about other states, but in CA, recyclers can also pay by the pound if you bring in more than 50 cans or bottles. Under 50 containers, they’re required to pay by the piece, but they’ll probably shoo you away as a nuisance for bringing in so few.
Isn’t this exactly what recycling is? The price is a return incentive, but that applies just as much to glass as to plastic and was imposed for exactly the same reason.
I think the idea here is that “recycle value” is amount of money the commodity (glass, aluminum, newsprint) is worth on the open market. We alter that market by tacking a .05 or .10 price tag on the bottles which makes them much more valuable then their material cost.
BTW *recycling *generally connotes processing the raw material to remanufacture another item, which might or might not be the same kind of item. That’s why I distinguished reuse from recycling.
That can add up to a major loss to the state of Michigan. People buy their canned drinks in New York and make their 5 cent deposit (which stays in New York) and then Kramer and Newman collect the cans and bring them to Michigan to collect the 10 cent refund (which comes out of Michigan’s treasury). This could (and apparently has) added up to MILLIONS of dollars of loss for the state of Michigan.
They’re not giving you what the can is worth, they’re giving you back the money you were supposed to deposit when you bought the can. They could just as easily charge your $3.65 for a can of coke and then give you your $3.00 back when you return the can. But then everybody would be in the business of returning mail trucks full of cans from other states.
“Nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine bottle and cans in the trunk, nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine bottles and cans. At ten cents a bottle and ten cents a can, we’re pulling in five hundred dollars a man.”
It’s already illegal in Michigan. We’re just looking at ways to enforce it and make it less attractive (such as increased fines and/or jail time).
Simplest way to stop it from happening would be to get rid of the deposit altogether, but as we can all see, the real point of the law is to make tax revenue. Unredeemed deposits go to the state and distributors, you see. No one is “losing” anything but opportunity. If every Michigander returned all of his returnables, the state and distributors would “lose” even more.
You can blame the nickel amount on Oregon. They inagurated the first bottle bill way back in the 70s and set the value then. Otrhers states mostly copied Oregon. Inflation over the years since then has made that 5 cents be too worthless for most people to bother, so it’s mostly homeless and other marginalized people who do the returning.
There’ve been periodic proposals to up the amount to 10 cents, but the supermarkets always oppose it. The problem from their point of view is that it isn’t set up to reimburse them for the expense of taking in the cans. The distributors, who have to take the cans from the supermarkets, do get reimbursed out of the difference between the amount of deposit paid in and that paid out. Ideally, this would be fixed if they do raise the amount, but I’ve never seen anyone propose that.
