from an article describing a previous attempt to circumvent the opportunity based on an episode from “Seinfeld”
NEWS
Flint man pleads guilty to ‘Seinfeld’-esque bottle return scheme
70-year-old returned more than $10,000 worth of cans from Indiana to take advantage of Michigan’s refund law on deposits
Brian ManzulloDetroit Free Press
A Michigan deposit is shown stamped on a beverage in Detroit, Saturday, Feb. 23, 2013.
Newman and Kramer would be proud. (Well, maybe.)
A 70-year-old Flint man, John Custer Woodfill, has pleaded guilty Monday to returning more than $10,000 worth of out-of-state, non-returnable beverage containers, according to a statement from the office of Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette.
It was discovered that, from 2012-15, Woodfill was buying uncrushed, non-returnable cans in Indiana as scrap, then returning them to Michigan to redeem the 10-cents-per-can deposit refund with the help of a partner who’s now deceased.
The partner would purchase local, non-refundable soda and beer cans for 60-80 cents per pound in Brownstown, Ind., then Woodfill would trailer them to Flint to take advantage of Michigan’s refund law on deposits, the statement said.
Also read:
Man ordered to pay fine for 10,000 nonrefundable bottles
Delta worker allegedly stole 1,500 mini booze bottles
“This was not a one-time nickel-and-dime case,” Schuette said in the statement. “This man orchestrated bogus refunds for tens of thousands of non-returnable beverage containers. In effect he stole from Michigan’s bottle return program that has long served to protect and promote a healthy environment. His actions also negatively affected distributors, merchants and even consumers who carry much of the burden in making the program work.”
For some of the beverage containers, Woodfill used “phony labels” to give the appearance of a proper bar code for automatic return machines.
This is an issue state lawmakers have tried to crack down on for years since 1978, when Michigan became the only state that refunds 10 cents per can or bottle. But it may sound really familiar if you’re a fan of “Seinfeld,” the long-running NBC sitcom from the 1990s.
In one episode, “The Bottle Deposit” - which aired in 1996, during the show’s 7th season - Kramer and Newman hatch a scheme to return New York cans and bottles in Michigan, where they can earn 10 cents per deposit instead of 5. Newman, a mailman, crunches the numbers and decides they’ll use a mail truck carrying spillover Mother’s Day mail to be sorted in Saginaw, therefore bypassing gas and rental fees.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2017/03/22/flint-man-bottle-return-scheme/99483692/
Do the bottles say the bottle had to be purchased within California?
If not, it’s the state’s fault. They did legitimate recycling.
Huh? Pray tell what are out-of-state containers and containers that had already been redeemed within California?
If they've already been redeemed within California, why are they not in the possession of the state of CA?
Ingenious and industrious!
Collecting garbage for profit. “America ... What a country!”
Well, the way the system is supposed to work - the state isn’t paying you for the can, it is RETURNING the deposit you paid when the item was bought.
So, if the deposit was never paid on the item, it’s not there to reclaim.
“containers that had already been redeemed within California.”
Wonder how they did that?
They got greedy. I wonder how many do this on a smaller scale. Say $500 a month.
Sounds like California should mandate micro-stamped bottles and cans, “smart” containers, and pull tab/twist top locks.
I don’t understand how they broke the law?
They brought stuff in to be recycled. They are allowed, by law, to transport items and personal items between states. Specifically, the Interstate Commerce act says that States cannot stop this type of commerce.
How is it fraud to recycle? Why do they punish people for aggressively recycling if it is supposed to save the planet?
Doesn’t make sense.
Have to give them credit for thinking outside the box.
Nevada charges a ‘deposit’——BUT HAS NO LOCATIONS FOR RETURNING SUCH CONTAINERS, IIRC.
Local Boy Scouts worked hard to collect from all of us-—then STOPPED because they couldn’t get them redeemed.
Take it up with Arizona. California greenies should be happy they are helping Arizona get rid of it's recyclables.
Cuck you, Falifornia.
In Michigan, the deposit is ten cents. In CA, it's five cents for bottles under 24 oz, and ten cents for bottles over 24 oz (i.e. 2 liter bottles.)
Typical soda can is 16 oz, which is a nickel deposit.
To get $7.5 million, you'd have to return 150 million 16 oz cans.
How do you return that many cans? Here in Michigan you go to a store that has bottle return machines, and you stuff the cans into the machine one at a time. At one can per second, that's 3600 cans per hour, or almost 42,000 labor hours to return that many cans.
How could you tell they were from Arizona? Don’t most cans and bottles have the various State deposit amounts?
For those who have been questioning why what these folks did is criminal, the answer is in the statement from the California Attorney General:
The California Beverage Container Recycling Program is administered by CalRecycle. The program’s California Redemption Value (CRV) fee incentivizes recycling at privately-owned centers with a 5- or 10-cent return on eligible beverage containers. California consumers subsidize the CRV program every time they purchase CRV-eligible bottles and cans in the state.
Only material from California is eligible for redemption under this program.
In October 2022, the California Department of Justice (DOJ) launched an investigation into a group of recycling centers in Riverside County operated by the suspects. The investigation found that over the course of eight months, the suspects smuggled 178 tons of aluminum cans and plastic bottles from Arizona and delivered them to undocumented lots in Riverside County. The suspects then unlawfully redeemed $7.6 million in CRV funds. Arizona does not have a recycling program that provides redemption value for bottles and cans.
Like my fellow Freepers, I don’t see a problem with that.
There is (Santa Cruz County) a maximum of 100# per day (cans)
specifically, to avoid import of cans from out-of-state.
Something ain’t right.
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.
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.
“illegally imported beverage containers”
Contraband!
Because many were labeled “coke”