How often is the consumer who fronts the nickel the person redeeming the nickel? I suspect the nickels are, in aggregate, a regressive tax. I have no data, however, to back that claim.
I would consider those nickels regressive if most of them come from the lower half of economic distribution even if they all end up in the hands of the homeless.
There’s a certain amount of people rummaging through the bins on trash night, but only in urban areas, and they can’t be that thorough. I imagine that most of our recycling rate comes from ubiquitous curbside recycling programs, and the CRV goes to the waste management companies, who just keep it as profit.
It's part of the negotiation with the municipality on the collection contract. If you want to call it offsetting costs or profit, money is fungible; if CRV was eliminated, billing for collection would go up in the next contract.
Technically speaking, any retailer that sells containers is also required to redeem them. In practice consumers don't really bother since no one really wants to wait in the (frequently long) customer service line to talk to people to redeem containers. Some larger retailers have dedicated machines, but I still don't really bother since those machines aren't very convenient to get to for me.
There's an entire "industry" where people pick containers out of recycling bins/trash/building-waste/building-recycling and then redeem it which creates interesting tensions with funding the NYC recycling program [0].
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/21/nyregion/new-york-city-fi...