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California pays crazy money for aluminum cans.
After I got divorced, I made friends with a couple living in Reno, and once every couple months I'd drive up there and spend the weekend drinking. These folks drank nothing but beer, but they started first thing in the morning and drank all day. Their side yard was piled with crushed cans. I asked Phil why he didn't recycle and he said Nevada didn't pay enough but I was welcome to take a load home every time I came up, and I could keep the money.
Every time I went up, I'd haul back another load and stop off at a recycling center before I hit the house. I made bank, 150-200 bucks every trip.
When I moved out of califukya , every time I went back to get another load ,the califukya border guards always looked in the back of my truck.
ReplyDeleteTake Dog Valley Road from Verdi NV to Truckee CA. It bypasses the AG Control Station on I-80.
DeleteI moved to Arizona. I'm sure there are back roads , but I haven't been back.
DeleteYou know what they say...You can't drink all day if you don't start early.
ReplyDeleteKnew a guy who would visit relatives in California every year. For a couple months ahead of time he would go to parks and rec areas, gather up all the aluminum cans and put them in his cart, then take off. The cans would pay for all the gas to and from the Midwest, with a bit extra for other things.
ReplyDeleteI’m a guessing these people that were busted weren’t members in good standing of the Democrat party. They’d still be in business if they were.
ReplyDeleteAs long as the Big Guy gets his 10%.
DeleteEvil Franklin
High Bail if you steal from the state, but not if you steal from business owners. But I don't consider it stealing from the state, the state is just being stupid.
ReplyDeleteGotta crush them so they can't see the CA CRV symbol.
ReplyDeleteDon't axe me how I know...
CC
Should have said "LACK of CA CRV".
ReplyDeleteCC
How many Californians pay the deposit then throw their redeemable empties in the garbage? How much money has California taken in? How much money has California paid out? Does California pay more to run the program than the state takes in?
ReplyDeleteMy nephew lives in New Hampshire ten miles from the Maine border. When he takes his trash out he will get the wine bottles and soda containers out of the recycle bin. He will take them to Maine to have a friend there cash them in. They split the money and it is enough to pay his fuel bill and a bit extra.
ReplyDeleteCalifornia is so fucked up. First they charge you a CRV fee when you buy drinks. Then they tax you for that very same fee. FUCK CALIFORNIA.!
ReplyDeleteAs kids we would walk the side of the road with our parents and a trash bag about once a week, long before the CRV program. Bottles went back to the bottling plant in exchange for a much smaller number of filled ones. Steel and aluminum went to a scrap yard for cash. I didn't realize it then, but sometimes that money and what dad made from stripping scrap copper wires from his evening handyman jobs was the difference between our parents having enough to eat and not.
ReplyDelete"...the difference between our parents having enough to eat and not."
DeleteDamn, they didn't feed you?
Evil Franklin
It's not a "recycling program". It's a container deposit program so throwing your trash out along the roads costs you a little, and low-lives are in theory less likely to do it. If the deposit is high enough, some will even find it worthwhile to walk around and collect the cans and bottles others threw out. OTOH, I've decided that at only 10 cents a piece, it's not worth _my_ time to stand there at Walmart feeding my empties into an automated receiving machine. I put my empties into a big clear plastic waste bag. When that's full, I set it out on the curb, and it disappears in just a few minutes. Someone around here needs the money more than I do. This suggests that if I were a low-life but no poorer than I am, I'd be flipping the empties out of the car windows, and all my other trash with it... (A real-life example of a rich low-life who tossed empty booze bottles out of his speeding car: Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President, Democrat from Texas. They don't mention _this_ in his Wikipedia biography.)
ReplyDeleteWhether or not the cans and bottles turned in for the deposit are recycled depends only on the economics of recycling those materials. Aluminum is definitely worth melting down to make something new but its value as a material is much less than the deposits. Recycling plastics is more difficult and often a net loss even if the plastics are already collected and free.
Transporting the empties across state lines is illegal for a reason. Some states require a 10 cent deposit, some 5 cents, and some none at all. You pay the deposit to a store, and it goes to a statewide fund. It's too much trouble for the beverage companies to have different containers for different states, so the same 12 ounce can of Coke is sold with a 10 cent deposit added to the price in Michigan and Oregon, 5 cents in eight other states, and none in the other forty states.
So if my son, who recently drove from his home in Oregon to mine in Michigan (both 10 cent deposit states), had hauled along a bag of 100 empties, he would not have made or lost anything, but the Michigan fund would have lost $10 and the Oregon fund gained it. If you do what people actually do and collect the empties in a no-deposit state and turn them in for a deposit in another state, you are stealing from the second state's fund. It would be silly to prosecute you for $10 or $20 worth of empties, but when several people are working together to do this by the truckload, the second state is losing enough money that something needs to be done.
As of today in Ky, AL cans are going for .50 a pound. The price in TN is .37 a pound. According to the interweb anyway.
ReplyDeleteYou need to get Newman, Kramer, and a U.S. Postal truck if you want to do it right.
ReplyDeleteDoes anybody remember the, "Collecat a million pop can tabs, and we'll buy your favorite charity a wheelchair" or some other thing. We were curious at work one time, so we gathered up a bunch of tabs and weighed them. A million tabs would have been a metric ton of AL (2203 lbs). Clean AL was around a buck a pound back then. Wheel chairs, maybe $400? Do the math.
ReplyDelete