Posted on 07/27/2023 10:40:15 AM PDT by lowbridge
A California family that earned millions of dollars just by recycling cans and bottles has now been accused of multiple felonies that could lead to years behind bars.
In a felony complaint filed this month, state prosecutors charged eight family members in Riverside County with defrauding the state by importing used bottles and cans from Arizona — some 178 tons in 8 months — and recycling them in California.
The recycling operation earned the family $7.6 million, according to a statement from the office of California's Attorney General, Rob Bonta. Investigators also found a stash of "illegally imported beverage containers" worth another $1 million.
When someone purchases a plastic or aluminum bottle in California, they typically pay an extra 5 to 10 cents in "California Redemption Value," or CRV, which the consumer can get back by returning the items to one of the state's more than 1,200 recycling centers. Arizona has no such program.
"California's recycling program is funded by consumers, and helps protect our environment and our communities," Bonta said. "Those who try to undermine its integrity through criminal operations will be held accountable."
In the criminal complaint, prosecutors accused family members of unlawfully conspiring to commit grand theft and defrauding the California recycling program on a "chronic and ongoing basis" by seeking reimbursement for out-of-state containers and containers that had already been redeemed within California.
Felony grand theft in California is punishable by up to three years in state prison. Redeeming out-of-state containers to the degree the family is accused could increase the sentence by another three years.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
So, what pray tell is the reasoning behind recycling cans and bottles? If a normal, semi-smart “judge” gets a hold of this case, Cauliphonya loses.
Bottle and cans have a recycling value even when other “recyclable” materials don’t. But getting people to segregate them for recycling takes the encouragement of the 5 cent fee. 10 states in the United States have container deposit legislation which include plastic bottles.
It is to encourage recycling and complement existing curbside recycling programs; to reduce energy and material usage for containers, to reduce beverage container litter along highways, in lakes and rivers, and on other public or private properties (where beverage container litter occurs, a nominal deposit provides an economic incentive to clean it up, which can be a significant source of income to some poor individuals and non-profit civic organizations); and to extend the usable lifetime of taxpayer-funded landfills.
All of this is done with minimal interference or assistance from government in the US.
Bottles and cans sold in Maine must have a UPS code on them. That code tells a machine where (state) it was sold. I have had NH cans in my returnables and the machine rejects them.
There are essentially three ways to return them. Clynk bags that you drop off with a UPS tag that identifies your account and after being processed off site, the money is added to your account.
Second, there are places that have (soda machine style) machines that you pop cans through that check the type and code, these machines take cans and plastic, sending them left and right to be shredded or crushed. Separate bottle machines crush the bottles into reusable glass.
Third, are old style places where you drive up, dump your cans into a big tub and the attendant sorts and counts the bottles.
The plastic does have a market, although not as robust as glass and aluminum (both which get remelted in high heat that would kill any bad stuff left behind.
About 40 countries including the US and Canada around the globe have some form of law dictating returnables. So while only 10 states i the US, require it, all of the Canadian provinces have laws relating to it.
Some of the information here was derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation
“It’s not commerce. It’s reclaimng the deposit you paid in the first place.”
OK. I get the fraud now. Nobody paid a deposit on those cans.
My next question is how do you know that they weren’t originally bought from California and taken to Arizona? Further, are the cans and bottle marked that their was a deposit? Shouldn’t California have ‘marked’ those that required a ‘deposit’ so that people could identify them? If they are marked as ‘deposit’ how do you know they weren’t from California? If they weren’t marked, and should have been, why did California pay deposit money for them? Are cans sold in Arizona really from California and marked by California law as ‘deposit’ cans, but no deposit is collected before exported (why would this be fraud—it’s just confusing)?
When I was about 10 or 11 years old I would go behind the delicatessen store and then take the bottles that he stored and then walk around the front of the building and cash them in.
I knew someone would post it.
You make stupid laws you get stupid results.
The original recycling programs were voluntary and run by the merchants who paid the consumer for returning bottles to them. Merchants then sold the bottles to outfits that bought them and sold them to glass bottle manufacturers. That’s capitalism working on recycling.
At most all “the law” needed to do was establish that merchants selling things in bottles and cans had have contracts with buyers of used bottles (glass or plastic) and cans as well as operations that collected them from their stores’ customers. The costs and prices would be determined by the marketplace, not regulations.
The stores would give buyers a return of x cents per container, depending on what would benefit them against what they could sell them for to the recycle waste distributors, and those distributors would base those purchase prices based on how much they could get from the industrial end-users of the materials to be recycled.
Glass has one advantage in that is always able to be made into new glass, and the disadvantage of greater weight for the size of any container, compared to aluminum or plastic, which means glass has higher transportation costs.
Glass has another advantage in that it can be totally sterilized of any prior content where many plastic cannot. That is why old soda pop bottles years ago went back to the bottling plants they came from - it was more cost effective than buying 100% brand new bottles. But all the billions of little plastic bottles medical drugs are placed in cannot easily be simply cleaned out and reused in the form they were last used in - they have to be melted back down into new plastic; they cannot merely be “sterilized”. The temperatures needed to sterilize them equal or exceed the temperatures that melt them.
That is an issue materials science ought to work on - pill bottles that can be properly cleaned after use and reused, again and again.
Nope!!! That’s taking advantage of the system... Good for them!
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If you and I could just get on that jury!
I don't really know. For example, we live near the Maine/New Hampshire line. Maine has a bottle deposit, New Hampshire doesn't. My wife marks with a magic marker any bottles we buy in New Hampshire with an "NH", those, when we're done, get thrown into regular recycling. The others go into the bottle-return bin.
If I accidently put a NH bottle in the bottle-return bin, my wife will carefully remove it, and pointedly remind me of the $5,000 (or whatever) fine.
As far as these people who were caught, I guess there was some way they figured it out.
keeping track of each state’s requirements
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Ask any long haul trucker about that, you’ll get an ear full.
In Maine do they give you ten cents for a returning a Moxie bottle? Five cents for the bottle, and an extra five cents for drinking the vile stuff?
“illegally imported beverage containers”
Contraband!
Because many were labeled “coke”
That's ray-cist! No can is illegal!
Regards,
If they had just regularly stolen under $900 per visit from retailers, they would have been fine. /sarc
hmmm...bottle and cans coming in illegally appear to get far more attention than illegal aliens do
that family shoulda been trafficking people...they woulda had a bonus
No one has mentioned any smart azz comment about Bud Lite. People are getting slow.
This is only an issue because it’s cutting into California’s free money.
How is it illegal? Is there is law against importing cans from out of state? Is it illegal to show up the stupidity of California policies?
That seems like a lousy payoff.
I’ve been told SNAP typically trades for 40 cents on the dollar, sometimes more.
You call it a landfill problem, we call it building new ski trails.
If the “criminals” would have pumped a mil or so into Gruesome Newsome’s campaign fund, they would have skated.
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