My bottle return story

Same here. And there’s the awkward moment when they hand you the cash with the dirty gloves still on and you kind of pinch the bill by the corner and tell them to keep the change because you don’t want it in your hand...

 

Just take your bottles to a party/beer store to return, the reverse vending machines are the worst. They usually reject a majority of things. I've stopped going to Meijers for bottle returns years ago. All local stores will take my bottles as long as they have the MI 10c label on them. I get all my dimes back, and the distributor still recycles them.

 

My bottle return story has to do with a time when I started working at a recycling facility after leaving my own business. I managed the recycle center at that time for a contract holder who cashed in all the nickels himself from the recyclables brought in (instead of the county resource recov. agency getting them), and to do it in bulk we had to separate them into bags for what kind of container and which distro handles it.

One trip to the local beverage store to cash them in we had so many bags we needed to use one of our ten yard dumpsters on a truck to carry them. Took two guys almost ten minutes to unload them all and put em into the shed. When we were done I apologized to the store owner for all the nickels we'd brought, since they filled up the shed. He replied, "Don't worry about it, I make two cents on every one" Something I didn't know, and which I find most folks don't know, in fact,

I believe in Mich. where OP lives retailers get 3.5 cents per container, so that lazy employee in OP was taking money out of his company's pocket.

 

yep

 

I live in a fairly rural area and I take all my trash to the dump. I could pay for curbside pickup from one of the big regional trash companies but its a hell of a lot cheaper to take it to the dump. A 39 gallon trash bag costs me $2 to dispose of so separating out my recyclables is a decent savings (especially since every can is worth 5 cents if I took them to the redemption center which I don't). If I went back to a waste management company I'd still need to separate my recyclables because anything larger than their provided bin for trash costs extra and they require you to separate or pay more. It sounds like the issue is more about how states regulate trash disposal than deposits.

 

Don't know this for a fact, but I'm sure the machines are programmed to make as much money for the company who hosts them as possible, like every other thing in the store. I only used them very occasionally, as I always had a lot to return, and it is so much easier to take 'em to the bev. store and get paid for them all quick and easy
.

 

That’s messed up.... do you mind letting us know where you tried to return our cans and they weren’t recognized? They should be. We’ll try to fix it asap.
Thanks
Brian
Bog Iron

 

Hey Brian, thanks for reaching out. It was well over a year ago and I'm pretty sure it was a 500ml bottle. I'm not 100% sure where they got returned usually a place in Middleboro, sometimes Muckey's in Lakeville (but they have a sorting guy I think so idk about that).

Cheers, keep up the good work!

 

Tomra is the company that has a monopoly on the machines in MI and their machines are notoriously difficult to program. I have to plug the UPC and package description into a page on their site, they then send that info to the distributor who can take weeks to confirm. Then once the distributor signs off on it, Tomra sends that info back to me then I have to upload it to the machine. This is all assuming their system is running as intended, which a lot of times its not. If I'm having a problem, they send a tech out to fix it which costs me at least $200. Its a huge hassle that rarely goes smoothly. I keep a printed list of the breweries we sell in the bottle return area for our employees to check against, why the chain stores don't do this is beyond me. As long as I'm selling something from a given brewery I will take all of their bottles and cans back, even brewery only releases.

I'm glad my state has a deposit law. My parents are from a state that doesn't have one and the amount of empties lining the creeks, rivers and roadways is disgusting. The current model we have isn't perfect, but a little bit of effort on the part of store owners can lighten some of the hassle. I would have gone to that asshole's supervisor and put the screws to him followed up by a detailed email to corporate.

 

Okay thanks. If you have a problem going forward and can let us know, we’ll get on it.

... especially at Mucky’s. We know those guys and they’ll get a face-punch (figuratively... not literally).

 

I'm glad to hear it; yes it's a very small needle. Consider some vitamin E oil on the wound site to reduce scarring.

 

Haha, no, the wound on your hand that was bleeding so badly. I assume you received stitches.

 

After working for about ten years in a glass bottle plant my opinion is that recycling glass makes almost no sense, the cost involved with sorting and shipping glass back to the (quite few) manufacturers to be remelted into new product is a loss to everyone. Glass is basically silicon, the most abundant mineral on Earth so raw resources is not an issue. Instead I think glass should be collected near the end user and crushed for use in other things like concrete, asphalt, clean fill or even dumped offshore (Glass is inert and doesn't cause pollution) Admittedly, this would not address littering, but that is a societal problem that possibly could be reduced by education and far easier ways to properly get rid of the bottles.

 

I was bit by a dog on a run this fall and had to get a booster. I chose the County Department of Health, cost was about 1/4 of the doctor's office price. If you haven't already received your shot, you might be able to look into that option.

 

I've had this happen pretty regularly here in Quebec. It drives me insane. More stores than not tell me they'll only accept it if it was bought there (even though they are legally obligated to), I have had stores tell me they'd only do it if they could scan the barcode (which only some bottles have), none of the machines ANYWHERE accept craft cans/bottles and all twelve ounce bottles, which are taken care of by Molson (available everywhere) yet no one will accept them either. Some times I have wanted to give a bag to the homeless guys that go around collecting cans (the craft bottles here are worth more than normal ones) but I don't want them to have to deal with snotty employees either.

To @rgordon 's point about getting a manager, I tried that once at a store that I went to constantly and spent a lot of money at, and the manager told me they couldn't accept it (no barcode) I asked if I could throw it in their recycling bin (not deposits) just so I didn't have to carry it home and she said they legally couldn't because it is considered the equivalent of money and so to leave it there they would have to give me the value of the deposit. On the beer I bought from them. Needless to say I got nothing and left the store with the empty in question... Lucky for them I like to recycle cause otherwise it'd practically be more of a headache than it's worth.

What did I do?!?