When we wrote last week about one of those marvelous recycling mysteries — Why is sales tax charged on soda can ‘deposit’? — we were unprepared for the onslaught of frustrated and angry folks saying they’re ripped off left and right:
- Gary Hart of Westminster traipsed from recycling center to recycling center and couldn’t find one that would count his plastic bottles. Instead, they’d only be redeemed by weight. “I was told that it takes 27 plastic bottles to make up a pound,” Hart wrote to us. “That would normally mean getting $1.35 for the redemption. However, now that it can only be by weight and one will only receive $.93 for a pound. The consumer is really getting the short end of the deal.”
- Failing to get the full amount of the “deposit” back has bothered Watson Kilbourne of Coto de Caza for some time. “As you know, if you purchase one hundred plastic bottles of water, you would expect to receive $5 when you return the empty bottles to a recycle station,” he told us. “But no, they will not allow you to count them and they are redeemed by weight only. The weight value is about half of the original redemption cost. And now that the plastic containers are much thinner, the redemption value is even less than before.”
- And then there’s newly-retired Bill Gorman of Yorba Linda, who just started carting his one-liter plastic sparkling water bottles to a recycler hidden behind a supermarket. “I brought about 20 of the bottles mentioned above as well as a wine bottle to the recycler — who looking at me told me I would get 5 cents a bottle — he seemed a little nervous in saying that — which made me look into what the correct amount should have been.” Since his plastic water bottles were bigger than 24 ounces, he should have received 10 cents a bottle, not 5 cents. “Even though we are not talking about much money – none of us like being ‘ripped off,'” he wrote to us. “Like most things in this world – power is knowledge – know what you should be getting before you travel to that recycler – if you don’t get the right amount the difference is going into someone’s pocket.”
Rise up, recyclers! The good state of California urges you to rat out recycling cheats!
“Recyclers are required to count bottles if you have less than 50,” said Mark Oldfield, spokesman for CalRecycle. “If they’re refusing to pay by count, we want to know about that. We want to go to them and make them do the right thing.”
So, how can you do this?
Send an email to complaints@calrecycle.ca.gov, or call 1-800-RECYCLE toll free, to lodge your complaint. Be as specific with the name and address of the dealer, and as brief recounting the nature of your problem, as you can.
“Bottom line is, we want to make sure that consumers get what they’re owed,” Oldfield said. “We’re a regulator, and we have the authority to take administrative actions against those who aren’t following the rules.”
AND WHAT ARE THOSE RULES?
The rules are that the recycler has to count up to 50 bottles of each type if you request it. You don’t get what you don’t ask for, people!
This means that if you go to the recycler with 50 plastic bottles, and 50 glass bottles, and 50 aluminum cans, the recycler is required to count each of them individually, if you ask him/her to count them individually.
Now, If you went with 51 of each type, the recycler is allowed to pay by weight, and not count them individually. That’s because counting is time consuming, and if everyone appeared with 300 bottles asking them to be counted individually…well… the lines would get long.
If you have 300 and still want them counted, you’re allowed to return as many times as you like in a day. So, after your first 50 get counted, you might want to go have a cup of coffee, queue up again and have the next 50 counted, and so on.
“The typical complaints we’ve been getting lately are about plastic bottles,” Oldfield said. “CalRecycle does field studies, so we know how many aluminum cans are in a pound, and how many glass bottles are in a pound, and we tell the recyclers, ‘This is the minimum you have to pay.’
“Plastics are more complicated,” he said. “You have those little teeny ones that are only 6 ounces, and you have the big two liter bottles, and there are many different thicknesses and different types of plastic. So it becomes more difficult to come up with a per-pound rate that exactly matches a consumer’s load.”
That, Oldfield said, is something CalRecycle is working on right now. Stay tuned.
Now, before we get an onslaught from angry Honest Abe Recyclers, let us state for the record that there are many wonderful, upstanding recyclers in California who do a great job and treat people fairly. It’s a shame what a few bad apples can do.
About 250 billion containers were recycled in California last year — or 82 percent of the containers in the program.
“That’s a lot that aren’t in landfills,” Oldfield said. “Scientifically, and culturally in California, we know that recycling is a good thing. It saves natural resources and it saves energy. It is basically the right thing to do.”
We’ll tell you a little more about why you bring your empties to those centers behind the grocery stores, rather than to the stores themselves, next week.
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