August 17, 2008
Joint venture brings efficiency, convenience to container returns
KALAMAZOO -- For consumers, the reverse-vending machines in many of Michigan's grocery stores have simplified the process of returning beer and soft-drink bottles for their 10-cent deposits. But the machines also have made things easier and less costly for retailers.
``The machines save a decent amount of labor,'' said Ed Gazi, store manager of the Harding's Woodbridge Market in Portage.
Before the devices came in about eight years ago, Gazi's store dedicated about 12 man-hours a day to counting and sorting returnable bottles and cans. It's a quarter of that today, he said.
Labor costs may have been reduced, but the savings have been taken up by the cost of the machines, said Tim Harding, vice president of Harding's Market in Kalamazoo.
The efficiency realized by retailers is being provided by a few companies, mainly Kalamazoo-based Schupan & Sons Inc. and a joint venture it has with a manufacturer of reverse-vending machines.
The joint venture, UBCR LLC, was formed in 1998 by Schupan and Tomra of North America Inc. It has streamlined bottle collection and recycling in Michigan, and today processes 50 percent of the state's deposit bottles and cans.
When a consumer drops a can or bottle into one of UBCR's machines, the universal product code is scanned to record the type of beverage. The machine stores the information on every container that it accepts, and that is used to calculate how many deposits are owed the store by its beverage wholesalers, who hold the deposits until they are redeemed. UBCR can also ``talk'' remotely with its machines to find out how soon stores needs pickups of empties.
Other than keeping the return area clean and organized, the store's only responsibility is to dump bins or bags of empty bottles and cans in large storage bins that UBCR collects.
UBCR does pickups from every other day to once a week. The approximately 2.5 billion containers it processes each year go to its processing centers -- one in Grand Rapids or one in the Detroit area.
Aluminum cans get shredded and sold to mills where the metal is melted into new sheets of aluminum and eventually turned back into cans.
Glass is sorted by color and sold to another processor that cleans it and melts it down to make new glass products.
Plastic bottles also are sorted by color and granulated -- a process similar to shredding. Because plastic is difficult to recycle, the granulated material can't be returned to food-grade plastic. It's instead used in park benches, carpet and fabric, among other products.
Schupan & Sons estimates a can or bottle returned in Michigan is back on the shelf as a new container in about 60 days.
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