Likewise. These days I give them to my housekeeper because she likes to redeem them. It adds about $15-25 to what we pay her every 2 weeks. I imagine if she does this with other clients she's making some nice extra cash!
The waste company has people that go through the recycling and pull out all the salvageable bottles and get the deposit themselves, so you can consider it a "donation" to SF Recology or wherever you live.
I don't think there are places in the city to take them. You need a car.
At a strip mall near where I live [in a city], where there is a grocery store as an anchor, the Goodwill donation truck also does bottle recycling.
I'm fortunate that I am within walking distance, but I do "save up" the bottles to make the walk -- and haul -- "worth it".
If you mean San Francisco, there used to be a place next to the Castro Safeway, but apparently now there are only places down on Bayshore.
IMO, the law needs to change. If you don't have a place to drop off bottles/cans within 3 miles, the tax should be removed from items in those areas. It is completely pointless to have an incentive that can only be achieved by driving for 45 minutes.
I think it's much harder to claim CRV refunds, and many fewer people do so regularly, than the designers of the system anticipated.
At this point its simply a tax. I'm pretty sure that the people who collect them from trash cans gets cents on the dollars for the cans and a middle man is making the profit on transportation of the cans.