Posted on 12/05/2018 4:04:42 AM PST by grundle
California requires people to recycle their empty bottles.
However, this recent news article from the Merced Sun-Star says that three people have been charged with “recycling fraud” in California, because the bottles they recycled were “smuggled” into California from Arizona. The bottles from both states are physically identical to each other, but the price paid for the bottles is higher in California than in Arizona.
In the private sector, this kind of behavior is completely legal, and it’s called “arbitrage.” This is what wikipedia says about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage
Arbitrage
In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.
This video shows an example of legal arbitrage. In the video, a guy goes to a bunch of Wal-Marts, buys up every copy of Monopoly for Millennials for $19.82 each, and sells them online for three times that price:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FknkqT5tHK8
What that guy in the video did is 100% legal.
But for some strange reason, the people who sold bottles from Arizona in California were breaking the law.
Even though the bottles that they sold were real bottles, they were charged with “fraud.”
And even though the bottles from Arizona were physically identical to the bottles from California, they were charged with “smuggling.”
It’s completely ridiculous that this is illegal.
The people who bought Monopoly for Millennials from that guy in the video don’t care where it came from. As long they get what they paid for, they are happy.
But for some weird reason, politicians seem to think that there is some inherent difference between bottles from California and bottles from Arizona.
In the real world, the only difference is the price. There is no physical difference between the bottles.
If recycling bottles was truly a good idea, then California would be happy to recycle bottles from Arizona, just like the customers who bought Monopoly for Millennials from that guy in the video were happy to buy what they bought. If the item in question is truly valuable, then the buyer won’t care where it came from.
Therefore, for California to mandate bottle recycling in some cases, while outlawing it in other cases – even though the bottles involved in both cases are physically identical to each other – is absurd.
Here’s a clip from “The Bottle Deposit” from season 7 of Seinfeld, where Kramer and Newman try to make money by recycling bottles from New York in Michigan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGJZcHgqX1g
I hunt the southern tier of NY. It’s is directly above PA. We buy food etc mostly in PA. There is no bottle deposit there. It is a nickel in NY. The owner of the land we hunt collects the bottles which state NY 5 cents and gets the cash for them. If NY or California didn’t want other state purchased bottles, they need to make the vendors of the product make specific bottles for just that state otherwise the games on.
Californians can’t take two steps without running into some state tax or regulation which add to their cost of living. That should have been issues the Republicans should have been using. If they were they never made a posting here in FR.
Are we talking about recycling, or bottle deposits? Not the same thing.
I agree. If the label on the bottle says that the California deposit is 10 cents or whatever, then any bottle with that label can be turned in in California for a dime. To require some sort of documented provenance for each bottle would be absurd.
We, in NH right next door have no bottle deposit.
Didn’t they make a Seinfeld episode about doing just that?
It’s not really arbitraging it is outright theft.
If you pay the “deposit” on the beverage container, then the deposit is returned to you when you redeem it. If you paid it in NY when it comes into and out of the “deposit” fund.
For example
If you paid the deposit in NY and returned it in Michigan, then you took the 10 cents out of Michigan’s fund, and NY did not forward the 5 cents to Michigan.
If you take the bottle you did not pay the deposit on in PA and redeem it in NY technically you are stealing from the NY fund.
Personally, I resent the bottle deposits on plastic. The idea was to get people to pick them up off the side of the road and redeem them. They should not be surprised when those very people have found a way to increase their profitability in doing so.
Ridiculous, isn’t it? The distributors should handle all matters of bottle deposits, if they decide it’s financially advantageous, and the state should stay the hell out of it.
So the beverage Vendors need to mark the bottles for only those states. The states who agree to multiple state bottle marking need to shut the **** up or fix the markings with the cooperation of the vendors.
The states bring this on themselves
Another in a long long list of reasons not to live in CA.
Yuk, yuk. The ole Mother’s Day run.
There are bottle deposits, which are used to encourage recycling.
And. And there’s a link to it at the end.
I guess I’m trying to draw a distinction between reuse, in which an object is used again, and recycling, in which the material of an object is used to manufacture another such object. Not really important.
California laws, regulations and government make no sense whatsoever — to normal Americans.
They do work well for leftist fascists and bureaucratic worms, though.
This author is a brain-dead Clymer. Buying a book at Walmart then reselling it for a higher price online is legal.
Defrauding the bottle deposit fund in California is called, ironically enough, FRAUD.
What would the author think about someone who bought a book at Walmart, then attempted to return the same book to Barnes and Noble where it sells for a higher price? Would that be OK in their book, too?
They do indeed. And who proposes and enacts the stupid legislation that creates these sorts of messes....democRATS.
The takeaway is the non-uniform value from one state to the next. If it was all the same, then it wouldn't matter where you bought it or redeemed it and it would all work out in the end, or you could go back to no deposit. But they are counting on the money that gets left in these accounts from the millions of bottles that do not get returned.
Virtue signaling liberals never think things through to their conclusion and never consider the potential for abuse.
“Everything not forbidden is compulsory”
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