Oregon Bottle Deposit System Hits 90 Percent Redemption Rate
opb.org
opb.org
Here's a recent article about the problem: "Oregon senator to introduce bill to thwart return of bottles, cans bought in Washington: She says grocery stores ‘drowning’ in out-of-state containers"
https://www.columbian.com/news/2018/dec/04/oregon-senator-to...
Has anyone seen more exact numbers that would either support or refute this?
Frankly, I think it’s better that these cans and bottles are being recycled, fraudulently or otherwise. I’m sure it hurts the Oregon pocketbook, but according to the article, the cost of the program is only six figures. This is only a problem (cost wise) when redemption is over 100%.
The program doesn't on a per bottle bases, but the effectiveness at dealing with the problem the program aims to solve (local landfilling recyclable containers) is impacted by the substitution; in the context of the function served, imported bottles that would not otherwise be imported are not fungible with local bottles.
Insofar as part of the purpose is local waste stream diversion (because landfilling has costs), yes.
It's true that the local cost is coupled with a remote benefit, but remote benefits have less value, ceteris paribus, to the people paying the costs.
If Oregon returns hit 100%, leaving no funds to pay for the program, the program isn't likely to continue without state taxpayer funding (currently, it's funded from the program itself and not the state's taxpayers).
As a theoretical point, even with a 100% return rate, it's still possible to make money on the float. Buy a 12-pack, deposit $1.20, return 1 week later, get $1.20 back, but in the meanwhile that buck-and-change could make ~1/50¢ in interest.
The same report says they do about 2 billion containers / year, which at 10¢/container is $200M. In the optimistic case of 1 year between purchase and return, assuming 2% interest, that's $4M. Assuming 1 week, I think it's $100K, so not much.
A more likely income source is the profit from selling relatively clean metal, glass, and PET. That report says 151.0 M Aluminum Cans per quarter. I see numbers around 2¢/can for the metal value, so that's $3M/quarter or call it $10M/year.
So even with 100% return rate, there is still money coming in. Just (as you say) not enough to pay for the program.
FWIW, https://www.obrc.com/Content/Reports/OBRC%20Annual%20Report%... says that there was "$25 million" in "Estimated value of 2017 unredeemed deposits". That plus the Al can value is easily enough to pay for the program.
Just a small amount of "excess" returns (bottles for which OBRC did not initially collect the dime, but pays out the dime) can push the overall program into the red. In the example above, only a 3% increase in return rate (from 80 to 83%) pushes the program into the red.
If you're claiming that the scheme is currently funded in such a way that something like a 3% improvement in return rate (fraudulent or genuine, OBRC can't tell) is a problematic financial event, then I suppose I get it.
The externality argument based on the cost of landfill (made by another commenter) is sensitive to whether the bottles come from out of state.
If there really was a problem I'd expect to see a different barcode for cans/bottles sold in Oregon vs other states.
Edit: more info.
One thing about the recycling centers though - you have to have an account, and you have to prove you are an OR resident to use them. I imagine that cuts down on a lot of out of state cans.
Map: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-ab&q=portla...
More info on the recycling centers: https://www.bottledropcenters.com/
Oh, and stores would limit what kind of returns they'd accept. So I'd have say, sorry, we don't sell that here so you can't return it here.
So, I'd imagine some of that is why they created the centers. Which, btw, I only just learned about from this topic.... :)
Why do you doubt that it could be a high percentage? A huge number of folks live in Vancouver across the OR/WA border and commute into Portland every day, and do their shopping in OR for the lack of sales tax.
Which makes it quite convenient for them to “return” bottles gathered from other people who shop near where the returner loves in WA to Oregon for the deposit.
You seem to be only considering people returning bottles purchased for their own consumption.
[0]: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/07/local/la-me-can-frau...
100 bottles is only $10! Think about the amount of effort required for this
Probably not systematically from CA, which also has a bottle deposit (though there may be some arbitrage opportunity since the CRV is, IIRC, 5¢ for some containers that have a 10¢ deposit on Oregon.)
That’s a valid bottle, but an abuse of the system because they are getting 10 cents from Oregon that was never paid. The point of the program is you pay 10 cents and get it back if you recycle.
As long as returns are <100%, I don't think it matters who bought the bottle.
The cost is covered because many bottle deposits end up going unclaimed.
But nobody paid 10 cents for that bottle.
The point of program is to recycle bottles. Exchanging money is means to an end not an end itself.
This sounds like a dozens of dollars level scam, not millions.
> not millions
No, not individually, but if tons of people are doing it all day, it adds up.
And bumping the fee to $0.10 makes it $36/hour which is very attractive to someone who doesn't have a job.
Again, the actual earnings are lower, but I think it's a realistic type of fraud.
There is a viable way to do recycling fraud, but DIY stickers isn't it.
You photocopy a sheet of barcodes and stick them on the bottles.
Some machines you can even hold the barcode in your hand, and put the bottle in, then you can put anything in and reuse the barcode endlessly.
This is not hypothetical stuff. Large scale operations have already been caught:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/12/03/recycling-smu...
> Three suspects were arrested in a case that resulted in fraudulent payouts totaling $16.1 million over three years, the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery reported Monday.
> Authorities said the Bustillos' trucking operation existed entirely to smuggle cans and bottles into California.
At least that's how I got over the limit in Michigan when I was in college. We used to save all our cans and bottles for the whole year and return them all at once.
You're not going to make much profit off the effort though, unless you value your time at $0.
100% of deposits have been paid for by people. If someone else returns their bottle and the deposit payer can't be bothered, that's a win win surely.
I get that Washington bottle buyer hasn't paid a deposit. But if Oregon bottle buyer has paid a deposit for a bottle, but chooses not to recycle it, there is a deposit that has been paid, but not claimed. What is the problem with the Washington bottle buyer returning their bottle in return for the deposit back? A bottle is returned, which is surely the aim of the deposit. The return rate is below 100% so there aren't unfunded deposits.
Separately, it's not clear the bottles illegally being returned for deposit are increasing the recycling rate. The article I linked suggests that they are being scavenged from recycling bins, and that (possibly as a result) collected glass recycling in an Oregon-adjacent county in Washington was down 9% after the deposit went up.
I guess Oregon is pretty close to finding out what happens when the return rate hits 100.1%; that would be interesting.
There's even a whole Seinfeld episode about why it doesn't work.
The fear that these rates were the product of fraud even lead to amendments to the recycling act in 2008, namely adding a state-specific mark to bottles. Yet the redemption rate remains over 90%.
You mean they're 3d printing fake bottles? No?
Oh, did they buy their own injection molding equipment and producing bottles? No?
Oh, so they're gathering corporate trash and returning it? And you call _that_ fraud? Uh huh. Sounds like the bottle return is doing a hell of a job.
One thing's for sure -- and this was discussed when China first reneged on recycling the plastics: Commingled recycling at the curb has been a disaster. In my opinion, predictably so. I remember being surprised when it first began, to think that it could be economical or efficient to have to separate the streams further downstream. Turns out I was right.
Sorting and separating isn't that hard, and people would've learned and mastered it by now, if they'd been required to do it. Contrary to the hope, if you coddle people they will not show their appreciation by meeting the new, lower minimum expected of them; they will continue to push the bar even lower.
Some local breweries are moving to reusable bottles that are washed and used many timees before recycling. We're building a washing plant in PDX this year to grow the program.
As an Oregon resident I actually feel like those bottles getting redeemed from out-of-state is better off than them going into a landfill. I think we can take whatever the offset to revenue is.
What's the real fear here? That this Senator hasn't had her name in the papers in a while?
Maybe they don't in practice because consumers don't rationally consider the net numbers, but theoretically they should.
Yea, I'm in Oregon, and this happens to me too. Honestly, who cares? What they are "stealing" (lol) is being recycled. If this senator cared enough, he would take his bottles/cans to the store and get credit for it. The point is, he doesn't care that much, but somehow feels entitled to something he doesn't care about.
There's a related issue where the residents don't always trust that the salvagers will content themselves solely to collecting redeemable cans.
That's the biggest problem for me. It was a fortune back then. My family would collect bottles all year and cash them in for a vacation. But back then it was 10c per bottle... 30 years ago. Today, it's still 10c per bottle. With inflation, that's more like 5c per bottle. Couple that with the rise in bottled water and other non-carbonated drinks that don't have deposit on them plus a lot of store brands and specialty bottles that require you to go to multiple stores to return, a whole day of collecting bottles might only net you $5. And then you have to spend another day going back and forth between Family Fare, Kroger, Meijer, Walmart, Target, and maybe even a specialty bottle store.
Even for kids, a lot of times it's not worth it for just a few bucks.
Picture: https://media.mnn.com/assets/images/2015/07/KBHPant-Copenhag... ("pant" is cognate with "pawn".)
Must cost a fortune to clean up the trash after people have been through them, way more than the few (euro)cents you get back...
They've also basically completely mitigated the fraud aspect of this by having all machines in all grocery stores scan the UPC on the bottle to determine whether it is manufactured in Sweden. The deposit is pretty significant there too, 1 SEK, which is equivalent to about 10 cents right now.
I grew up in Norway, and while Norway certainly isn't free of homeless people, I never saw this despite a widespread bottle return system (in fact, the Norwegian company Tomra has a majority of the world "reverse vending machine" market, primarily focused on bottle returns).
Norway have had a return rate in the 95%+ range for years in large part because a variety of groups of people see empty bottles as an income source.
I think this to a large extent have also culturally solved the problem: while some people certainly throw their bottles in the bin, there's little reason not to instead put your bottle down next to it, because you know it will get picked up.
So instead of collecting your deposit, you can now click a button to see if you win a price (up to 1 million NOK), and if you lose you donate it to the Red Cross.
I remember as a kid in the 80s collecting bottles at events etc, back when a bottle of Coke was 6kr so the 1 kr deposit made a difference. I feel happy these days to press the donate button though when I am in the country.
If we spent a few hours doing it we'd get a couple hundred dollars easily. But damn I've never smelt anything worse than a blue massive trash barrel filled with beers cans that are all a year or older. Worth about $20 on it's own though.
https://fox61.com/2018/05/17/connecticut-trails-other-states...
There were a few kids doing this, so you had to be quick and know the locations where many bottles were to be found. The best spots were usually the places where the teenage "cool" kids who considered returning bottles below their dignity were hanging out, and you had to be brave enough to approach them. To this day, I remember the pure joy of finding a motherload of bottles, maybe up to 10 at once, and always leave bottles on the top of garbage cans in the city for the homeless :)
What a lovely system we've created.
I personally will not be bothered redeeming in Oregon, since all cans and bottles have to be manually fed into the reading machine. Coming from California where I can just bring a trashcan full of cans in and get my money, I find the system a complete waste of time.
I separate out my recyclables for the canners and leave them out for whomever wants to put in the effort of standing in front of the coop for an hour.
[1] https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/ISD/RA/2017-Point-in-Time-Estima...
Redemption rates are all above 50% I guess that's not too bad.
https://fox61.com/2018/05/17/connecticut-trails-other-states...
In order to have a bottle bill, a state needs to tax every bottle, convince grocers to help collect bottles, and operate recycling processors. Thus, the state's population needs to be liberal/blue/neoliberal enough on tax policy, have a strong bread basket with lots of farmers, and care for the environment.
Why do bottle bills tend to get high amounts of participation once enacted? Environmentalism is more popular than folks think. The bigger reason, though, might be that a culture of recycling has become popular. It can be easy to place a bottle into a container on the street, or for a restaurant to collect a bottle on behalf of its patrons, and those unredeemed bottles contribute to the redemption rate.
If the deposit is large enough, then a market for scavenging bottles can form, incentivizing redemption at scale, but this is usually considered a bad thing.
The way it works in Norway is that there is an excise tax on bottles and other drink containers. Every recyclable container you recycle gives you a credit against the excise tax. There is a national return scheme that retailers can opt into to handle the recycling, but in theory they could operate their own. The return scheme in effect costs less than the excise tax.
Shops can decide not to participate, but in that case they sell drinks at the same price as everyone else, but has higher costs per bottle sold. (EDIT: Shops could decide not to participate; apparently that's changed at some point in recent years; it's now compulsory)
That was enough to convinces pretty much every corner store, gas station and supermarket in the country to redeem bottles. Especially because they can do so for store credit, and so it helps drive footfall of people who will tend to spend the money immediately.
The hard sell is getting people to accept it as necessary to get the legal framework in place.
Some places (California?) grocers don't accept bottles for redemption, recycling centers do instead.
Another reason is that the tax punishes those that don't. One wonders what the redemption rate might be if it was 50 cents a bottle? Or if you fined those that don't recycle them?
How are farmers relevant to whether or not a bottle bill is enacted?
Kudos to Oregon for doing this.
Many stores have automated scanning machines. You feel UNCRUSHED bottles and cans in, a worm drive spins them around while scanning for the barcode. If that can was sold in MI, you get a .10 credit. You just stand there feeding them in at bigger stores. Many of the grocery stores devoted a portion of their cart storage / entry to these machines. It's important to note that they are required to be uncrushed because it's a pain in the ass storing full size empties imo.
Those with "real pop addictions" won't have any issues though ;)
They are a pain in the ass though because they are always filling up and/or jamming and then you have to call and wait for staff to come fix it. If you are redeeming a whole cart of bottles you're going to have to call the staff over at least a couples times. They are always in use so you have to wait. The rooms they are in are nasty and sticky. The bar code reader doesn't always work the first time (and sometimes doesn't work at all for some bottles) so you're constantly refeeding them into the machine.
They get a TON of use, so they go out of order frequently.
My grocery store just got brand new ones and they are better than the last ones they had still have problems.
The law that established the excise tax on the bottles has a clause that basically reduces the tax relative to the sellers redemption rate, so the stores have a financial reason to accept the bottles, as the excise tax is higher than the cost of participating in a recycling program.
I'm fortunate that I am within walking distance, but I do "save up" the bottles to make the walk -- and haul -- "worth it".
Homelessness has been an issue here for a while, but by making it more economically viable to do bottle deposits this program has created mini hubs for the homeless to converge on.
There is a large Target store downtown with bottle deposit machines, there is usually a group of homeless folks who hang out overnight waiting for the store to open to deposit their goods -- and they leave a trail of trash and needles behind. And generally make it unpleasant to shop at the store.
Bottle deposit isn't really a means of addressing homelessness but it is just another factor when considering how chronic Portland's homeless issue is.
In addition, I'm glad I stay away from the target for can recycling. I think I'll stick with the Whole Paychecks down in the Pearl, even of that POS breaks way too often.
I just stick everything in regular recycling.
I would guess homeless people are the only reason it's anywhere near 90%. Everyone I know does curb side recycling.
Michigan is different however. When you spend half the year surrounded by snow and freezing temps, even the idea of going outside is numbing.
I was living in Michigan and Illinois this last year, and they are light-years away when it comes to interest and availability of recycling process, compared to Oregon.
I've seen you make this comment twice in this thread and while you say you've lived in Michigan I think you drastically underestimate the resiliency of the majority of Michiganders. It was negative wind chill recently and now that it's back up to the mid 20s I see tons of people walking around without a coat on. The cold doesn't bother us that much.
That might be the biggest issue. Around here (Finland) the deposit system is universal; most beverage containers are standardized and in the system by default. And the machines accept containers not within the system, they just won't give you money for them, so you don't have to worry accidentally mixing containers with deposit and those without.
The idea behind it was to increase recycling of cans and bottles, and it did it's job. In the 70s and 80s, it was great to push that for the social good. But it's done it's job, two generations are now recycling more than ever and the coverage for curbside recycling is very high in Oregon.
But the redemption rate has plummeted in the last decade! Of course it has, people don't want to have the hassle of taking cans into a location, wasting time putting each one in the machine, and getting a couple bucks back. So they were forgoing the 5 cents and just putting it in the curbside bin. News flash - the cans in the curbside bin didn't count toward redemption rates! Oregon also made it so stores didn't have to take redemptions anymore and opened redemption centers that aren't very conveniently location for most of the state. So the rate fell - and now they have increased the rate to get people to take the cans in again. Eventually the rate is going to fall AGAIN, and not because people aren't recycling the cans, they just aren't taking them in the redemption centers.
The system is now worthless and just kept going because. Directly north of us, Washington doesn't have a can or bottle redemption system and there aren't cans and bottles everywhere - people just put them in the curbside bins like everything else.
Bottles and cans with deposit that are thrown into curb-side mixed-waste bins (or just on the ground) are usually very quickly collected by people looking for extra cash (on summer weekends this can net you quite a lot!) In some places I've seen small separate can receptables attached to garbage bins that can hold a stack of cans so that it's easy for someone to come grab them without having to delve into the garbage bin proper, which I find a very good idea.
when the public is rewarded for returning a usable product, usable in the sense it is worth more to recyclers, they apparently do it quite often. the reward is instant or tangible whereas curb side is mostly forget about it which in turns leads to it not being valuable down stream. being instant furthers participation. it is a good lesson to take to other states looking on how to implement a winning system.
so curbside, sounds good, feels good, doesn't really amount to something.
personal drop off with instant judgment and payout works better
The owners say demand has been very strong for the finished product.
> The advantage of this system is that the material can continue to have adequate quality to be used again for food. Strict health regulations cover the aluminium, plastic and glass we drink from.
> This is why aluminium from used beer cans may solely be used for new beer cans if it has not been mixed with other aluminium items such as empty paint cans. Similarly, glass bottles cannot be recycled into new bottles containing soft drinks if the glass has been mixed with waste glass from light bulbs, for example.
> When we send plastic, glass and aluminium from bottles and cans for processing, the material goes exclusively to facilities and companies that are approved to manufacture food packaging. We inspect regularly to ensure that the requirements are met.
https://www.danskretursystem.dk/en/use-again-and-again/close...
The statistics for recycling etc are here, but my Danish isn't good enough to skim through and find the relevant figures: https://www.danskretursystem.dk/presse/#/documents/aarsrappo...
Yeah, these won't stay "sparkling clean" for long. I used to make an effort to redeem bottle deposits: I'd pull up in my truck and attempt to unload everything I've accumulated over the preceding couple of weeks. Eventually I got tired of jostling into position in front of the machine, arguing with the homeless, and getting into fights over who gets to go first. The sorts of people who redeem bottle deposits in NYC do a very good job at scaring away regular folks who might want to do the same.
I also tried to recycle it at the store's recycling machine and it says it's not accepted. Recently found this out but haven't looked into it yet.
I always do the bulk option, you can just drop bags off at a drive-up location. They charge a small percentage to handle it for you but it's worth it to me to have someone else handle it.
On the other hand, we and the neighbors have had things disappear. People have prowlers in their back yards "looking for cans". So it seemed like a good idea to stop setting them out or even having them visible.
What I do now: you can buy bags and bar code labels for about $.10/pair. When a bag is full of recyclables, you tie it off, put your label on it, and drop it off at one of the BottleDrop centers.
There's two kinds: one where they have people working there and one where they don't (the "Express" versions). At the Express places, they truck the bags to somewhere else where they're counted. They charge $.40/bag to count them.
So for $.50, or 5 bottles, I can have someone else count them instead of standing on the sticky, stinky floor to shove in bottles one at a time. It's about 8-10%, assuming you can get 50-60 bottles and cans in a bag.
There are also grocery stores where they let you drop off your empties and they count them and give the deposit to a specified charity.
Source: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panteordning_for_flasker
Achieving a 90% redemption rate could still be 100% nonsense.