Oregon has a 5-cent bottle deposit on many cans and bottles – such as for pop, water, and beer. There used to be bottle and can recycling machines in the grocery store parking lots to feed your bottles and cans into and get a cash voucher which you could take inside the store and use like cash, or redeem for cash outright at the customer service desk. These recycle areas of the parking lots were usually swarming with angry bees, and even angrier wasps, stunk to high heaven, and were also swarming with rag-pickers with shopping carts heaped with hundreds of cans and bottles they had collected from around the community and were turning into cash.
Now the State has opened these stores called BottleDrop (official Oregon Redemption Centers) placed at strategic places around the community where you can return your cans and bottles and get your deposit cash back. Calling it a ‘redemption center’ almost adds a religious undertone to the places, don’t you think? We had accumulated 21 water bottles and cans, so today I visited the BottleDrop in our neighborhood on my way to the grocery store to recycle them. It was not a ‘good thing’, as Martha would say.
It was a horrid, smelly, fetid place that only lacked most of the Tracker Jacker (ala Hunger Games) insects swarming around the old outdoor facilities. The floor was awash in pop and beer and all manner of sticky stuff that stuck to your shoes as you walked through it. I waited in the first line about 10 minutes where a woman in a HASMAT suit counted my bottles and cans and gave me a cash voucher. Then I had to go stand in ANOTHER line for another 10 minutes to scan my voucher at a machine which spit out my cash. There was only one cash voucher machine. This line was very long, as many of the other “customers” were scanning in lots of vouchers at one time. Many of them had wheeled their purloined grocery carts up to huge machines where they fed them in one at a time and collected vouchers when they were done with a cart load. Since I had less than 50 items, the HASMAT lady had to handle mine. I did not want to even touch the sticky voucher machine to get my cash. After I left, I wished I had thought to have given my $1.05 voucher to someone else in the line and left. As soon as I drove on to my grocery store, I went straight to their restroom and washed my hands before getting my groceries.
All of this to get back $1.05! I will not do this again. I will just put my bottles and cans out in our recycle bin next to the trash and let the rag-pickers who come through here late in the night to scavenge them, get my 5-cent refund. They will earn it. I will just consider it a donation to the less-fortunate.
I suppose the 5-cent refund encourages a certain element of the populace to collect these valuable items which can be turned into tax-free cash – no questions asked. It keeps the highways, byways, empty lots, and alleys litter-free – of cans and bottles, anyway. They should do the same thing with those awful plastic bags. The City of Portland, Oregon has banned the plastic bags, but none of the surrounding communities have yet to follow suit.
It certainly was easier back in the old days when you could simply take your returnables back to the store where you bought them, and turn them in there. Now it has become an onerous and odorous added errand in our already busy lives. I am totally in favor of recycling. If someone else wants to take the time to get the cash for turning these things in to that noxious center, they are welcome to the 5-cent refund I paid on my cans and bottles. I probably burned up more than $1.05 worth of energy getting to the place, which isn’t exactly good for the environment, either.
Whine, whine, whine.
carpyharpy 