Growing up in California, I assumed the bottle deposit system was a federal thing. Moving to North Carolina and seeing people causally throw away glass bottles into the trash was definitely a cultural shock for me.
Kudos to Oregon for doing this.
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".