California Stsate Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) is seeking to reshape the way bottles and cans are recycled throughout the state, his office announced Monday.
According to Ting, Assembly Bill 1840, intends to reform the state’s Beverage Container Recycling Program.
Ting said many Californians have decreased recycling because they’re having harder times finding sites where they can collect their California Redemption Value refunds. Consumers pay the CRV when they purchase beverages from a store, however, when the containers are recycled, the CRV is refunded.
As a result, he said, recycling in the state has dropped from 85 percent to 75 percent and much of the state’s recyclables end up in landfills.
“We can no longer kick the proverbial can down the road,” Ting said in a statement. “If California is to continue its leadership on the environment, we must deal with this problem that’s been in front of us for years.”
Ting’s Bill builds off of AB 54, Ting’s measure that took effect back in October and helped launch five mobile recycling programs in areas severely impacted by the closure of CRV redemption sites.
The state’s one-time largest recycling company rePlanet closed its 284 remaining sites throughout California last summer.
The firm closed hundreds of locations due to a decrease in the price of aluminum and recycled plastics, coupled with international waste material market conditions, Ting’s office said.
Better yet, stop charging for CRV. I turn them in for cash but it’s a pain in the arse.
How much will this “reform” cost the residents of CA?
This is the type of issue that every legislator should be looking for and fixing…rather than wasting time with their bs proclamations.
CRV is a de facto tax.
I’m deterred from recycling because although you pay $0.05/$0.10 per can or bottle, you only receive a fraction of that back when you go to one of the recycling stores in Concord. They will refund 100% of your CRV, Bbut you’re only allowed some ridiculous amount (eg 20 bottles per trip).
This isn’t a solution to the problem most people in California face. I have a large recycling bin, but it gets harder each month to know what we can actually place in it. And then, we don’t know how much ends up in the landfill anyway. Recycling needs to be user-friendly, and that means we need to be able to actually recycle products here in the U.S. instead of shipping it to China so they can dump it in the ocean.
U.S. ships it’s recycling to 3rd World countries who dump it in the ocean… And here I thought the U.S. turned our recycling into something useful within the U.S.
and then those goods are made in another country and shipped back to the US for consumers. It’s absolutely ridiculous!!
This bill right now isn’t much more than kicking the proverbial can down the road.
A portion of the bill reads as follow:
“This bill would require the department, on or before January 1, 2022, to make recommendations to the Legislature on how to improve the act to increase recycling of beverage container materials within the state and increase consumer redemption convenience.”
It doesn’t sound like the Assemblyman has a concrete plan other than having CalRecycle make recommendations up to 2 years from now.
I will see if I can make more headway with my contacts at CalRecycle going forward. Feel free to reply with your constructive recommendations and I will pass them along.
Read on to learn about how cockroaches, gangbangers, the homeless, the price of oil, and Claycord are connected.
I used to recycle bottles and cans by count but as it’s a hassle I ran a few rounds of tests where I counted the bottles and then redeem by weight. I discovered that I got paid about the same value. Sometimes by weight paid a little more and sometimes a little less compared to counting. Once I learned that I no longer bother with counting when redeeming CRV bottles and cans.
In mid-February 2016 Nexcycle and rePlanet, the two main companies that used to operate CRV redemption centers in many grocery store parking lots in this area, shut down and laid off their workers. Many of the recycle workers had looked like former prisoners with most having gang tattoos. I assumed they were participating in a prison-to-work program and was happy to see that they were working. I don’t know if the prison-to-work program was able to place these people elsewhere when the recycle places closed.
Immediately after the February 2016 shutdown the homeless stopped picking up discarded bottles from the local trails and switched to stealing bicycles and stealing packages off of front porches. We are now approaching four years since the Feb-2016 shutdown. A few places now accept recycling. However, only a couple of the local homeless seem to collect bottles as their main source of income. The remainder subsist on government aid, and petty theft such as shoplifting, breaking into cars, stealing bicycles, and stealing packages.
Another issue is that grocery stores and outlets such as Costco are not set up to process and store recycled bottles and cans. It takes staff time and building space away from the main mission of the store plus adds a cockroach/vermin problem meaning they pay for additional visits by pest control companies. Store employees and the pest control people tend to be union labor meaning the store’s cost is also much higher than when recycling was operated by Nexcycle staffed by former prisoners. The Nexcycle container/buildings were nearly always at the far edge of a parking lot from the store which also kept the cockroach population more under control.
One of the main factors that lead to the February 2016 shutdown was that oil prices were low. That meant it was cheaper to make new plastic from oil than to process and recycle old plastic into material that’s usable for industrial scale production of bottles and other plastic things. Oil prices crashed in mid-2014 and have not recovered.
As you can see, it’s an interconnected economy that had been sustained, or perhaps propped up, by high oil prices. The cockroaches likely don’t care as they have moved on to getting featured in Claycord’s Dirty Dining reports..
I found that enlightening, another of my life’s mysteries solved Thank you, WC Resident.
Oregon seems to have the working solution as I type. They use to redeem at each store but consolidated in order to reduce costs. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
These locations are clean, well lit (yes, inside too) and well staffed.
https://www.bottledropcenters.com/