![money-down-toilet[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/money-down-toilet1.jpg?quality=83)
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A Californian truck driver has been charged with smuggling tons of used beverage containers from out of state into California, to defraud the California Redemption Value (CRV), which pays out 5 – 10c per beverage container at Californian recycling centres.
According to Reuters;
A Los Angeles-area truck driver has been charged with smuggling 7,000 pounds of used beverage containers into California from out of state, marking the third such arrest this year in a crackdown by California’s recycling enforcement agents.
Cesar Vargas, 42, is accused of trying to defraud the California Redemption Value (CRV) program, which allows empty soft-drink bottles and cans to be redeemed at state-certified recycling centers for the 5- or 10-cent deposits consumers pay on those containers when they are purchased.
California’s so-called bottle bill program, which collects and redeems roughly $1.2 billion in deposits a year, was launched in 1987 to encourage recycling of beverage containers made of glass, plastic and aluminum.
California is one of 10 U.S. states with similar programs. Because most states, including neighboring Arizona and Nevada, lack their own container-deposit laws, California restricts its CRV payments to returned in-state containers only.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/08/us-usa-recycle-california-idUSKCN0PI00D20150708
This Californian fraud case might be peanuts compared to say the massive carbon credit frauds which rocked Europe in 2009, or the Danish carbon trading fraud scandal of 2010, where criminals using false identities and fraudulent carbon credits robbed Denmark of 2% of its GDP, or the multi billion dollar carbon exchange hacking scandal of 2011. You might recall that the gigantic European carbon frauds only faded away to an extent, after the European carbon market collapsed – though as a recent WUWT post shows, criminals are still active in what is left of the world’s carbon markets.
However, this case serves as a reminder, that green subsidies attract criminals like maggots to rotten meat. And who knows, beverage container fraud seems such a simple, obvious crime – the handful of arrests (3 this year) may just be the tip of the iceberg.
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I’m confused again. Surely this is just an example of interstate commerce, where an item is taken to where it is of the most value? As far as “smuggling” goes I would have thought that it was legal transportation. There is no attempt at evading duties or taxes.
Has California gone so [mad] that they are trying to ban normal commercial activity? If so then the rest of the U.S. may start banning Californian products as illegal competition.
It’s not smuggling, it’s fraud. There is nothing wrong with bringing the containers into California. The containers can be legally sold to the recycler at the their scrap value. The problem comes when they try to get a refund on the deposit, for containers that never had the deposit put on them.
Moderators, for crying out loud. If you are going to have an article that talks about fraud, can’t you turn off fraud as one of the naughty words?
[Life happens. Then you die. Deal with it. 8<) .mod]
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/23/smugglers-still-cashing-in-on-michigan-can-refund/1941567/
This is nothing new and is an especially big problem for the state of Michigan that has a 10c deposit on cans. I live in Indiana which has no deposit on cans and travel to Detroit Michigan to assist my elderly father around half a dozen times a year. It would be easy to save up and bring our Indiana cans to Michigan to get 10c for them on trips to Detroit. Besides the fact that this is not ethical behavior, laws that have consequences for those that get busted(even with a tiny chance of that occurring)are a good deterrent for people that exercise good judgment.
Not that I always exercise good judgment but the thought of waiting for the cops to come after an attempt to defraud is discovered, then going to court and paying a fine that would likely exceed any benefits from cashing in the out of state cans is pretty unappealing.
The Michigan bottle/can deposit has done a great job at addressing this small element of liter/recycling but the state is doing very poorly in other bigger measures:
http://misoftdrink.net/Deposit_Laws___Recycling.html
Shocked that CA doesn’t force sellers to print CA identifying marks on cans and bottles. After all, shifting this cost would be just one more small part of the forced labor and cost shifting state mandated distributed recycling entails.
I live in California. The cans and bottles are labeled.
Hard to see how transport amounts to recycling fraud then. They throw the book at him; he pleads out; the actual case is not aired; we never learn whether the press release claims were true. Interesting the prosecutors and cops did not wait until delivery was made.
When I lived on the Big Island of Hawaii as a kid, I used to seek out all the favorite spots where fishermen would fish with a pole from the rocks, and then dive there to collect the zillions of lead weights that would invariably snag on the coral.
Then I’d put the weights in coffee cans, build a big fire around the cans (great fun!), create cylindrical lead ingots, and sell them to a recycler.
With the capital accumulated, I created Max Photon International, an amalgamated conglomerate focusing on core industries in key technological arenas. Today its slogan is: Get the Lead Out.
Perhaps that explains why I have an IQ of 57.
Max Photon —
The whole thing is funny but it took a moment for me to get the joke.
I don’t know if lead poisoning lowers IQ but it certainly seems to make you weird.
Eugene WR Gallun
Plumbumphobia.
I pick up the lead tire weights that fall off cars. I read somewhere that reloaders (people who recycle bullet casings) like the tire weights because of the Antimony in the alloy making it very close to what is used in commercial bullets.
It is quite a coincidence that nearly 1 in 4 WUWT commenters used the funds raised, by scouring ditches for old bottles, to put themselves through college and keep from starving during the Great depression.
Some extravagant soul was spending a lot of time consuming beverages out of doors and discarding the highly valuable containers into local ditches and swales to make this possible, that seems clear.
I do know that at least one California comedy duo bought most of their life-saving baloney by scavenging for bottles in empty lots, during the hardscrabble years prior to hitting the big time on the big screen. Thank the Lord for Orange Crush!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7839857.stm
paper, not worth recycling in the UK. (I remember my school, in the 1970s, having paper recycling. The Health & Safety culture put a stop to that, a big stack of flammables under the main stairs in one of the school’s blocks.
The recycling in the UK, is driven by EU rules. Many EU countries don’t have large holes they can fill with rubbish, so to encourage recycling, there’s a landfill tax.
When I was a kid we lived on a Southern Cal beach, I was a bit young but my older brother would pick up all the left over bottles on the beach as the day’s crowds left and we would haul them in a wagon down to the local grocers for refunds. Good money for a 7 year old.
Where I live we have a transfer station, where trash separation is mandatory. For unsorted trash there is a per-pound fee of 7 cents, as well as fees for certain items like tires, furniture, equipment, and a 7 cents per pound fee on demolition. The recycling keeps costs down due to lower tipping fees, as well as whatever income from the actual recycled materials. Of course, people have the option of paying to have their trash picked up, or paying for that service thru somewhat higher apartment rent.
We sort our trash, not because it is “good for the planet” but because it saves us money, albeit with a little extra work on our part. We make sure our trash is clean, minimizing our trips to the center. We have a bump-out on our kitchen, built about 20 years ago when we had some renovation work done. This has containers for cans (metal and aluminum), glass, and plastic, and when full those are emptied into barrels we keep in the basement. Paper is in a separate container, which also gets emptied into a barrel downstairs. Kitchen scraps go in compost, down back. Everything that is flattenable gets flattened, to cut down on bulk. We take a load to the center, which is actually only about 2 miles away something like every 2-3 months. It’s a bit of a pain, but we have it pretty much down to a science.
Im not sute what recyling does besides making throwing out the trash more annoying and giving people who get pinched a place to fill their community service hours. I haven’t done much research on the impact. I basically recycle everything to impress women my age if they happen to go through my trash.
“However, this case serves as a reminder, that green subsidies attract criminals like maggots to rotten meat. ”
Please be very,very careful calling the CRV a “subsidy.
Very similar the the falsehood that liberals claim about “subsidies” to big oil.
While there’s a lot to be said for recycling, I have this dark-minded suspicion that kitchen waste policy is dictated by the desire of WMI (for example) and other operators to move their rat infestations problems from their sites to homes and local collection sites.
I think a lot of comments on this miss the point of a bottle/can deposit. It’s not about any economic value for recycling, it’s primary purpose is to significantly reduce or eliminate litter.
People will reach into garbage bins near food places and grab bottles and cans, it’s essentially just dimes that someone else voluntarily donated. When I buy beverages I throw the empties into a container, and every few months I take a load to the bottle depot. I dump them into a bin, someone comes along and does the sorting and counting, I get cash, and only a small amount of time is spent on it.
It’s not about recycling. The bottle depot usually hires people that have no other skills, or would otherwise be on assistance. It’s a crappy job, but at least it’s a job.
US and Canadian beverages are packaged differently. Most depots instantly spot the differences, and although they will take the US cans or bottles they don’t pay for them.
All in all it’s a good system, WHEN everyone is participating. I really don’t understand the reluctance. I pay 10 cents for a can, I get 10 cents back, and it’s extremely rare to find cans or bottles littering the city. This is one “do good” program that has nothing but positives in the real world.
Something’s not right here. Why, why, why on Earth would Reuters actually bother to run a news story about this. The only possible explanation I can come up with is to thoroughly embarrass the state of California. I mean, c’mon, why would anybody, anywhere, possibly arrest Cesar Vargas for this. You can’t really say this is thievery. I mean, does anybody know anybody who’s ever called the police to report an empty beer bottle having been stolen? “Officer, an empty soda pop can has been stolen out of my refuse container.” Do the police ever really get calls like that?
Or, smuggling? Smuggling is drugs, firearms, or human trafficking. It is most definitely not empty pop cans or beer bottles.
Grand theft? Theft is when somebody takes something without giving anything back in return. Last time I checked Cesar Vargas was giving them 7,000 pounds back in return. If he’s a thief he’s the hardest working thief I’ve ever known. Heck, he’s probably one of the most productive members of society there is.
So what is it with the arrest and likely incarceration of Cesar Vargas for the non-crime of the century; the non-crime of the millennium?
Typical liberal/progressives; they muck everything up in the economy then spend dollars trying to fleece non-criminals for pennies. I’ll bet these sanctimonious morons added 30 days and a $500 fine to his sentence because Cesar Vargas was picking his navel during the booking procedure. It’s what they are.
It’s not about him. It’s for us. Get in line, citizen. Or else.
Do the cans in CA still have several other states embossed on the can? If so there is the problem. It has been 25 years since I was in CA but I an sure they were marked that way. Many states as I drive from Iowa to NY have multiple states embossed on the can. Some even have two rows with one row for 5 cents and another for 10. Seems like a Bottler problem. Don’t let the bottler make cans out of state.
I’m with the truck driver on this one. He goes to the trouble of collecting all that recyclable material and gets charged by the government for upsetting their subsidy program. Why not let the free market take over? If too many cans are showing up then reduce the return amount. Who cares where they come from. Isn’t the point to recycle?
Um, I don’t really think anybody would willingly accept, or admit to, a job title such as ‘California recycling enforcement agent.’ So, I’ll be kind and simply refer to the California state dufus who arrested Cesar Vargas as an officer and allow him at least some pride.
Now, if I was that officer I think I’d dig a hole, crawl into it, and try to disappear.
I mean, let’s think about how his day went following that non-courageous arrest. He gets home:
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy’s home! Mommy, mommy, daddy’s home! Daddy did you arrest some bad guys?”
“Son, I’d rather not talk about it.”
“C’mon daddy, did you arrest some scary bad guys like Spider-Man or Batman does?”
“Son, please stop it.”
“Biffy, go to your room and leave your father alone, he’s tired. Honey, how did work go today?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
I’m your wife. We have to confide in each other. I can help you. Tell me what happened. Please. For us.”
“Uh, oh well, ok. I made an arrest.”
“You weren’t hurt or anything? So, what’s the problem? You got a bad guy off the street. You’re protecting us. You made the community safer. You’re a hero. You’re my hero. You showed courage. You made the world a better place.”
“Honey, stop it.”
“Oh, you’re too shy. You’re a hero and you don’t want to admit it. Tell me, please tell me. Who did you arrest? For what?”
It is at this point that our officer turns tail, exits the home, grabs a shovel and starts digging a hole. He is subsequently arrested by the State of California for illegal hole digging.
Option 1: the raw materials (after accounting for processing and sorting cost) is worth more than the 5c deposit.
If so, CA shouldn’t be “enforcing” border security on bottles. They should be laughing at the neighbouring states giving them 10c worth of stuff for 5c and encouraging any other states that stupid to also bring all their bottles to CA.
Option 2: if the recycling actually consumes more than the value of the deposit, they should not only prevent Nevadans doing it – they should stop Californians.
Option 3: it’s all about landfill cost in which case they should use all that land instead of building bird fryers on it.
I recently bought a 12oz can of R134a to recharge the air conditioner in my car. The deposit on the can was $10. Yes, that’s 10 dollars not 10 cents. You can bet I took that can back as soon as I had emptied it. My question is… Why did the state of CA do that?
Just part of the “Let us be like Argentina” plan.
Started in 2011 to reduce GHG emissions: Notice the “90” days
“The recycling program involves consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. A $10 deposit will be required for each container of automotive refrigerant at the time of purchase. Containers are required to be returned within 90 days with a valid, retailer’s proof of purchase for refund of the deposit. Retailers will collect all used small containers from consumers and return them to the original manufacturer for recycling.”
This makes no sense whatsoever. Either empty cans and bottles have a value or they don’t. The fact that they come from somewhere else should have no bearing on it at all. What this says to me is that “recycling” is not cost effective at all and is a complete waste of time and money.
David commented: This makes no sense whatsoever. …..“recycling” is not cost effective at all and is a complete waste of time and money.”
I repeat…..the original purpose of having a bottle deposit was to get them back for reuse. True recycling and cost effective at the time, That morphed into “save the planet from litter” and like everything else in the environmental movement the narrative doesn’t follow the reality. When a can/bottle deposit is more trouble, effort, and time to redeem than it’s worth, and the economics of recycling prevent it from going through the process, it becomes a tax to pay for trash collection. It’s when one man’s trash becomes another man’s trash.
There is one thing in all this thread that really bothers me. If recycling is really profitable, why aren’t they paying us for what they collect from the recyclable bins? I can understand paying to have real trash removed, but if valuable recyclables are really worth something, why isn’t that value offsetting our trash removal or even generating us a profit?
It is offsetting some of the costs. Taxes would be higher if they were not reducing costs. Unless you live in one of the places that they always raise rates and even if their costs go down, they just spend the money on new office furniture or “training junkets”.
I will post it again here so more will see it.
Everything has some value.
The trick is accumulating enough of like materials in one place to be able to sell it at a profit.
The sorting process and economies of scale dictate what is worth doing and what is not.
Try to get some dirt delivered to your house to fill in a low spot in your yard…end you will find you have to pay to get it. Even if in your same area, others are having to pay to have dirt taken away.
The value is determined by many factors, which in an open market is translated into variable prices.
Scroll through the various tabs and ads on this site…you will see that nearly every part of the solid waste stream has some value to someone, somewhere. As with most things in industry, efficiency is key.
http://www.scrapmonster.com/
For everyone insisting that paper has no value as scrap, here are the numbers:
Mixed paper, around $35/metric ton in the SE US.
Corrugated paper, around $90/MT.
http://www.scrapmonster.com/paper/scrap-price/old-corrugated-containers-occ-11/404
I used to have to pay a fee to have a credit card in my wallet, way back when in the 1980’s.
Then things got more competitive and some card issuers realized that some customers are valuable enough to offer them a free card in order to get more of the business.
Still later, it was realized that even if card issuers were to actually pay the cardholder to use it, they would still make money, and by doing so, they could get enough extra business to make more profit than they otherwise would.
So now I have cards with no annual fee, and that repay me 1 or 2% of all my purchases.
If I am smart, and mange my finances well, I will never incur any cost for using these cards.
1% is not much on an individual small purchase, but if one buys everything, including paying bills and whatever else one can without incurring fees, one will get a nice little check every now and then.
Sure beats paying an annual fee, even if I only get $100 for every ten thousand in annual spending.
But by using the card, I also can rack my expenses and have recourse if I need to return something or am unhappy with the purchase.
This is the same with recycling…it may not pay much back, but it reduces costs and any money earned offsets some of my yearly spending. I will never be able to live off of my cash back savings on my ccs and likewise recycling will likely not eliminate the cost of collecting garbage…but it does lower it somewhat…more for some materials, less or not at all for others. And, like the credit cards, there are some less tangible benefits to doing it.
Some people could not be bothered to get a credit card with a cashback perk built in…but I know of one very rich person who bought a 10 million dollar painting at an auction, and paid with his airline miles card. He then flew wherever he needed to fly for the next several years for free, and his family too. Someone spending that much on a painting likely does not need to worry about the cost of an airline ticket, but he had to pay for the painting somehow, and the CC made it easier and safer as a transaction.
It is better to save than spend, and better to conserve resources than use them up. Some may be more annoyed that pleased to do so, seeing the effort as more of a headache than the savings is worth…but it is far from logical to forgo efficiency and reduce resource usage.
I have long believed that on balance the powers behind the environmental movement are more interested in “the money” than in “the environment.” Along comes nutty California to make my case. Here we have an individual who for personal financial reasons commits an act that has a side effect of helping the environment. So how do the “powers that be” respond? They criminally prosecute the guy–not because he’s harming the environment (he’s doing the opposite), but because he’s costing the state money. You have to laugh.