With profit doubled, CT bottle and can returns — including fraud — increase

Doubling the payout for cans and bottles from a nickel to a dime apiece led more people in Connecticut to redeem them in the first part of the year, but analysts don’t anticipate knowing how strong that trend is until in late summer.Jan. 1 marked the first time in 44 years that consumers got more for redeemable containers, and environmentalists are hoping it will get a lot more people headed to redemption centers and reverse vending machines with their empties.At stake is whether tens of millions — or potentially hundreds of millions — of containers are diverted from the state’s trash system every year.Even if the increase holds steady or climbs a bit, Connecticut still needs to do more to encourage returns, particularly in regions like central and western Fairfield County that don’t have redemption centers, according to state environmental officials.And despite recently fine-turning the state’s “bottle bill” that dates back to 1980, recycling advocates are looking to make more changes in 2025 with a special focus on preventing cross-state fraud at the Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York borders.Bottle return attendant Carlos Kobach helps Heather King and her daughter Morgan both from Middletown, with their cans at MT Bottle Return in Middletown on Friday, June 21, 2024.(Aaron Flaum/Hartford Courant)New state data shows a 53.5% redemption rate on cans and bottles for January through March, Connecticut’s best performance in nearly six years. That accounts for the first three months when the deposit return was raised from five cents to 10; it was good news, but not great, said Chris Nelson, supervising environmental analyst with the state department of energy and environmental protection.“The numbers went up, but not as high as I was expecting they might,” Nelson said. “We still need to see the longer-term effect on redemption. The second-quarter numbers (April through the end of June) will have a little more indication of what the 10-cent deposit landscape looks like. We should have those figures in August and September.”A Stop & Shop bottle room in Connecticut. The payout for redeemable cans and bottles rose to 10 cents apiece on Jan. 1. (Don Stacom/The Hartford Courant)Environmentalists are hoping that consumers will respond to the financial incentive of higher redemption fees because Connecticut’s return rate has been lagging. In 2009 and 2010, people brought back between 50 and 70% of the redeemable cans and bottles in the state, but the numbers have been slowly dropping back ever since.The rate has sputtered in the 40 to 52% range since 2018, and averaged a meager 43% in 2022.The difference is enormous because of the massive number of water and soda bottles, beer cans, juice cans and other returnable cans that are sold every year in Connecticut: In 2022, they added up to about 1.7 billion, according to DEEP statistics.Buyers paid about $85 million in nickel deposits that year, but redeemed just $39 million worth. For environmentalists, the concern is that about a billion empty containers weren’t returned. Some went into the general recycling stream, but others ended up on streets and sidewalks or in the state’s already overstrained garbage stream for incineration or landfilling out of state.So boosting the return rate to 53% would have meant about 170 million more cans and bottles definitely diverted from the waste stream.Diversion was Connecticut’s goal when it passed its bottle law in 1980, setting the deposit and redemption fee at a nickel. It wasn’t until 2021 that legislators agreed to raise that to a dime beginning this year.Still, that’s far ahead of most of the country: Only 10 states have bottle and can redemption laws, and just Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon put the fee at 10 cents. The other seven are a nickel, and the other 40 states have charge no deposits and pay no redemption fees.Plastic bottles fall into a bin after being counted for returns at MT Bottle Return in Middletown on Friday, June 21, 2024.(Aaron Flaum/Hartford Courant)That’s problematic at state borders because people can cheat the system by bringing “free” bottles and cans for redemption just across the line.“Just last summer, California agents indicted eight people on felony charges after they were caught smuggling 178 tons of containers from Arizona into California. This scheme was valued at $7.6 million,” Andrew Ginsburg, general manager of Hartford Distributors Inc., told lawmakers this spring.Ginsburg and others asked lawmakers to protect Connecticut businesses from people bringing bagloads of empties from Massachusetts and New York, where they get just a nickel apiece. The fraud would bring even more to Rhode Islanders, who pay no deposit and get no redemption fee.“I, and others in my industry, are concerned that this increase in deposits will lead to an increase in the illegal redemption of containers from our surrounding states,” he said. “The migration of empties from neighboring states not only burdens our recycling infrastructure but also undermines the integrity of the bottle bill.”The General Assembly this spring passed a bill that makes fraudulent return of empties a violation of the state’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, but doesn’t spell out penalties or the enforcement mechanism.Reverse vending machines at the CVS in Burlington. (Don Stacom/The Hartford Courant)Environmentalists are hoping that lawmakers take up that issue in the next session, and Sen. Rick Lopes, who chairs the Environment Committee, said this week that he supports the idea.“I’ve heard of fraud with out-of-state cans, and that’s something we intend to address next year,” Lopes said.Cheating on redemption evidently can be lucrative.“Today we already treat this kind of behavior as illegal and have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in mitigation efforts. Last year we hired a full-time loss prevention specialist dedicated to Connecticut,” Mike Noel, public affairs director for Shelton-based Tomra, told lawmakers.Tomra and Naugatuck-based Envipco are the two major reverse vending machine operators in Connecticut; their equipment is found in supermarkets, drug stores, discount food stores and other retailers that provide redemption services.More cans and bottle are being redeemed in Connecticut now that the price has climbed to 10 cents apiece. (Aaron Flaum/Hartford Courant)While those one-at-a-time machines are familiar to individual consumers, some individuals and many restaurants, businesses, sports venues and other large-quantity buyers use bulk redemption centers that accept bagloads of containers at a time.Some of those have closed in recent years because the nickel redemption fee no longer provided enough margin to support their business, and the pressure has been strongest in one of the most affluent and densely populated parts of the state: Lower Fairfield County. There are no redemption centers west of Bridgeport, largely because of land costs, said Nelson.DEEP is hoping the new 10-cent price will make redemption centers more feasible in all sections of the state, and the agency is also looking to new models such as the Clynk system that is being used in some other states. Customers buy pre-coded bags from a vendor, fill them with returnables and just drop them off at a store. The company collects the bags, counts the containers and allocates the payouts based on the computer code; the customer gets the money as a store credit.A company is proposing to use a space in Bristol as the pilot for that system in Connecticut.

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