california CRV (aluminum can deposit) redemption sites have all closed

i am looking for info on california Cash Refund Value of aluminum cans



first i was trying to figure out the best prices in the bay. then i remembered that my local scrap yard -aarons metals- stopped their aluminum CRV program during the pandemic (doh) and i had to go to some other scrapyard with no parking and and a bunch of tweakers on bicycles waiting in line with a single bag each ... i recycle my huge pile once a year so how do i haul my 12 bags of cans from the parking lot to the scrap yard without them getting jacked????

im reading online and it looks like all the CRV centers were shutting down even before the pandemic! anyone have any info on this? google yeilds almost no results on the discussion forums... only news articles from fall 2019

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.

Up here, returns for bottle value are done in scrap yards in the Maritime provinces only and for metal value everywhere, but scrap yards around here dislike to buy cans ( aluminum grade supposedly hard to resell). In Quebec, the returns are done at the groceries with Tomra machines and at the counter for beer bottles. It was suspended during the first wave, but it is pretty much returned to usual business. The only difference is the government announced yesterday that the provincial bottle redemption reform is postponed 'til Spring 2023. Maybe we will get bottle depots as Maine and Alberta currently have, but it is still unclear. Right now, soda/beer cans and soda bottles have a 5¢ value (except some large beer cans) and beer bottles are a dime each. After the reform, everything you can drink from and that includes from water bottle to juice bottle to milk carton to hard liquor will have a deposit and the paid amount will be different. Also, BC also announced this week they will include milk containers to their bottle return program.

My wife had been bugging me for quite sometime to take in our bottles and cans. We have lived here in NoCA for almost five years and I never did the recycle bit. To me it is embarrassing, lots of homeless and tweakers in this little town and that is what they do to buy their booze and cigs. But last week I got tired of tripping over bags and boxes in my carport and shed. It took my SUV two trips to get them all to the recycle center only a 10 minute drive away. Came to just over $40. I get home each time and my wife has her hand out.

A mile further down the road is our transfer station. I go there all the time to bring in scrapped out TV sets. 57 CRT & 89 flat screens. Got everyone for free.