It’s Saturday morning, time to clear the carport of all those returnables. You arrive at the supermarket to find that a dozen other people had the same idea. Half the machines that count and crush the cans and bottles aren’t working. Most of the rest are being used by pros with shopping carts piled high. You stand in a puddle of equal parts water, soda pop and beer. Finally it’s your turn, and you feed the bottles into the slot — until the electronic display says the bin is full. When the store clerk in charge of the machines returns from his break, he wrestles a tub full of deadly-looking shards of glass from the bowels of the machine. You begin again. This time the machine won’t take the bottles — they came from another store. You put those containers back in the trunk. Finally you go inside to redeem your receipts, thinking that your hourly rate for $2.10 worth of deposits is well below the minimum wage.
There has to be a better way.
Maybe there is. A state task force, created in the wake of the expansion of the Oregon Bottle Bill to include water bottles next year, is examining far-reaching changes in the deposit-and-return system established in 1971. A leading possibility is to establish one-stop redemption centers — an idea that sounds better all the time, particularly if Oregon wishes to add still more containers to the list of returnables.
The Bottle Bill works, but grocers have long complained that it works at their expense. Grocers are required to pay for something they don’t want: thousands of soda cans and beer bottles at a nickel apiece. The empties take up a lot of space, and handling them requires a lot of manpower. When the containers are dirty, and often they are, they can create sanitation problems.
Oregonians have brushed off these complaints for decades. Collectively, grocers don’t return more in deposits than they charge up front. The convenience of being able to take containers back to their place of purchase is one reason the Bottle Bill has been such a success.
But even the staunchest defender of the Bottle Bill finds it hard to avoid feeling sympathy for the grocers. And it’s plain that whatever burdens grocers bear now will become heavier with the addition of water bottles. Still more containers ought to be returnable — sports drinks, wine and liquor bottles, iced teas — but adding these would push grocers’ waste-management capabilities past the breaking point.
Redemption centers could be the answer, if there were enough of them in convenient locations. Such centers could accept all returnable containers, regardless of where they were purchased. They could process returnables quickly by weighing them instead of counting them one by one. They could even be set up to accept other materials that should be kept out of the waste stream, such as batteries and fluorescent light bulbs.
The Bottle Bill has served Oregon well for nearly four decades, but any significant expansion brings the limits of the current system into view. Redemption centers would open the way to a broadening of the deposit-and-return concept, with retailers as willing partners.
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