July 28, 2008
British Columbia depots stand as model of success
Curious about what it would be like to haul your empties to a redemption center instead of the supermarket to get back your nickel deposits on beer bottles and pop cans?
Ask a Canadian.
Oregon Bottle Bill expert Peter Spendelow, an analyst for the state Department of Environmental Quality, has studied and visited several U.S. states and Canadian provinces that encourage recycling through their own deposit-return programs. He said British Columbia’s program is a model for the kind of system Oregon is considering: reducing grocery stores’ role in taking back empty beverage containers and sending most recyclers instead to redemption centers.
While Oregonians are proud to live in the first state in the country to adopt a bottle bill, British Columbians were the first in North America to do so, enacting their deposit return law in 1970, a year before Oregon acted.
And British Columbia is a full decade ahead of Oregon in modernizing how its deposit program works for beverage containers. In 1998, when the list of deposit-return beverage containers was expanded from beer and soda to include everything except milk products, grocery stores and distributors decided to do something about the huge new volume of empties headed their way, said Malcolm Harvey, spokesman for the nonprofit corporation formed by the industry.
That corporation, Encorp Pacific, now contracts with the operators of 172 “Return-It Depots” throughout the province of about 4 million people. The centers are staffed, utilize touch-screen monitors and employ scales to rapidly determine bottle and can counts and speed the return process, Harvey said.
Retailers still accept empties, but are nowonlyrequired to accept 24 bottles or cans per customer per day.
“The retailers don’t particularly like it and in most cases would like to be out of the business,” Harvey said. “But that’s not likely to change in the foreseeable future.”
If there’s been a drawback to British Columbia’s system, it’s that the redemption centers are not always conveniently located. Some cities have insisted on locating the centers in industrial areas, out of most consumers’ main traffic routes. And citizen concerns about attracting bottle-and-can scavengers who frequent redemption centers have kept them out of some parts of Vancouver, Harvey said.
Still, he said, British Columbia’s emphasis on consumer convenience has eased its transition from supermarket to redemption centers.
“It’s got to be as easy to dispose of it as it was to buy it,” Harvey said. “People planning your system have to understand that consumer convenience is paramount.”
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