Why don't all states have bottle return refunds?

Factual Questions
1

In MI, and a few other states, bottles are returnable for a refund. Most of you know this.

Why doesn’t every state adopt this policy? It would mean that nearly 100% of all bottles get recycled, and that there’d be no littering in the streets. What do the homeless people do in MI for money? They collect (or sometimes steal) your pop can for the 10 cents it’s worth.

It seems like a win-win situation. So, why not? Forgive me if this has been discussed recently.

Adam

“Life is hard…but God is good”

2

I don’t know if this answers your question Arnold, but when we lived in Augusta, GA, we still bought cokes in bottles. Faithfully taking them back to the store each week.

We moved here to Atlanta, and when we tried to take them to Kroger, we were told, ‘thanks but, no thanks. It was too much trouble, and took up too much room, and was a bug collector.’ We had to take what we had to Augusta when we went back for a visit.

Now just the recycling bin gets our glass/plastic and newspapers.

“Consider it a challenge…”

3

Bottle and can deposit laws are not popular with grocery stores. They have to collect the money, separate the totals from their receipts and sometimes they have to provide a place for people to bring the cans and bottles back.
Overall, they’d rather not have to deal with the hassle that comes from collecting empty cans and bottles.

4

I’m sorry I called you ‘Arnold’ my brain is mush today!!

Judy

5

Speaking as a city dweller with no car. It’d have to be a large deposit to keep me from pitching them. It’s hard enuff lugging the bottle home much less lugging the old empty ones back on a bus or el train.

Or else I’d buy the Coke at the Dominick’s or Jewel and return it to the Ma and Pa store around the block.

6

ive wondered about this myself; 20 years ago you took your empties to the store and your bill was credited. now we throw everything in a “waste management” recycling bin. hmmm . . funny i dont get a check from waste management every month . . does anyone?

7

I have several points to make:

– “Return for refill” bottles are indeed a huge space, labor, and bookkeeping headache. There’s also a huge averhead involved in transporting, cleaning, and sanitizing bottles before reuse. This makes this flavor of recycling (more properly, reusing) fairly unpopular in many regions.

– Here in California, we use a recycling-for-refund system in which the bottles and cans are seperated by material (and colored/clear in the case of glass), and are then melted and remolded (into other things, in the case of plastic). Our glass bottles aren’t as heavy as the returnables other states are used to, since they only need to surive one trip to the consumer instead of many.

– The reason you don’t get a refund for your curbside recycling is that most similar programs run at a loss due to the overhead invloved in running extra trucks, seperating the stuff, and so on. Here, the garbage collectors bring three trucks round on trash day: one for the stuff going to the landfill, one for the recycle yard, and one for the compost yard (plant and garden debris). We get one bill for all three cans, and I can only surmise that the trash co. uses the profits from the trash collection to underwrite the losses they incur with the recycling.

A committee is a lifeform with six or more legs and no brain.

8

<small>initially, AWB writes to bda:</small>

No, I don’t get a check from them either. Somebody’s making money at this recycling, and it ain’t us.

Growing up, we used to collect aluminum cans. Instead of a per-can rate, we got 24 cents per pound. Coors had recycling sites all over the state (Colorado, of course).

In DC, a bottle bill got shot down as racist. (!) That’s because paying 30 cents more per six-pack would be too much of a burden on the poor “African-American” families of the District. They conveniently forgot to mention that they’d get the 30 cents back if they returned them.

(I kinda miss Mayor Barry. His rhetoric was so entertaining.)

The word is no. I am therefore going anyway.

9

No one’s mentioned that when a deposit law is enacted the price of beverages goes up a lot more than just the deposit price. The distributors have to pass the overhead on to us. Now that curbside recycling is common I think deposit laws should be ended.

I for one welcome our new insect overlords… - K. Brockman

10

In Michigan, the proposal was put on the ballot in 1978 and voted in. The states that don’t have deposits would also have to put the issue to a popular vote, and most of them seem unwilling to do so.

Not entirely. All of the aluminum recycling centers went out of business. As mentioned elsewhere, it causes storage problems for the stores. The larger stores have to employ extra help to handle a task that generates no income for them. People who buy carbonated beverages have to make room in their houses or apartments for the containers. And the law didn’t end litter as we know it, it just made it more expensive.

Since the machines that many of the larger Michigan stores use for returns only scan the bar codes, they can’t tell if a can was sold with the deposit. Therefore, cans from out of state are being cashed in. In response, the state recently passed a law calling for up to a year in jail and a $1000 fine for bringing cans and/or bottles from out of state. Does this mean that I’ll be doing something illegal when I bring Dad a few 6-packs of a brew that he can’t get up there?

“A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back, he ever wants to see a cross?” – Bill Hicks

11
      • The profit margin for recycling almost every material is quite small. Aluminum is the most profitable; that’s why you can still find recycling pick-up points that pay you for your cans. Aluminum is somewhat unique in that it is rather expensive to produce initially and that it can be easily recycled into material that has the same quality as the original product; you cannot say the same for steel, and most every soup, fruit and vegetable in the grocery store comes in a steel can, but steel recycling centers are quite scarce.
      • Most typical types of glass are easy to recycle, but the stuff is so cheap to produce initially that using recycled material isn’t financially justifiable.
      • Cardboard is relatively easy to recycle, but only because it is a low-quality material to begin with (the fibers are rather loosely bound) and most often, it is turned back into cardboard. *Generally, when a material is recycled, it is reconstituted into a less-refined material. - MC