Part of my day job involves operating a beverage container recycling center here in Maine. Many of the bottle redemption centers here closed before the pandemic because they were not making enough profit to stay in business. China's Operation National Sword program back in 2017 pretty much killed plastics recycling here in the Unites States. The market for recycled glass has never been good. Aluminum cans are about the only thing with recycling value these days.
Then ... the pandemic hit and many states temporarily shut down their bottle recycling programs because they didn't know whether or not the Covid-19 virus could be transmitted this way or not.
So ... yeah ... there aren't as many places doing it these days. It's mostly for money reasons. You only make a few pennies per can or bottle profit. That was good money when we first started our bottle recycling program back in the 1970's. It's a very slim margin of profit these days. We run it mostly as a community service. It gets people into the parking lot. They generally take their bottle money and spend it in one of our other stores where the margins of profit are higher.
It sounds like you are used to cashing in your bottles and cans at the scrap yard. It's different here because none of our scrapyards are in the bottle business. We have bottle recycling centers just for the purpose of doing bottles. That's all they do.
I did a quick Google search of CRV recycling centers in San Jose. Ranch Town Recycling came up as a possibility. They have flatbed carts that you can roll out to the car. You might be able to bring six or twelve bags in all at once.
There is one other possibility. When we first started out ... we used to do all of our bottle counts by hand. It was so time consuming that they guys couldn't keep up with the workload. It wasn't very long after that that we automated the whole process by going to reverse vending machines made by the Tomra company. It's a pretty good process. The customer backs up to the machines with a truckload of bottles. They feed the bottles into the machine. The machine sorts, crushes them, and keeps a count. The machine spits out a ticket for the value of the bottles when the customer is done. They take the ticket and redeem it for money in one of our stores.
You might ask around if there are any Tomra RVM's in your area. It takes a little getting used to but most of our customers get the hang of it pretty quickly. Not a perfect system but a pretty good one overall. The machine won't cheat you the way some hand count places do.
Bookmarks