So Friday morning, I stop at my local McDonald’s and order some breakfast, when lo and behold, what caught my eye –
Two signs regarding the rights and responsibilities of redemption of bottles in New York State. The first sign was listed as a redemption bill of rights, as in you have the right to return bottles for deposit, as long as they’re clean and the like. Sounds almost like the Clash’s song “Know Your Rights.” If you get my drift.
The second sign was the one that set me off.
WARNING: Persons tendering for redemption containers on which a deposit was never paid in this state may be subject to a civil penalty of up to one hundred dollars per container or up to twenty-five thousand dollars for each such tender of containers.
Oh yeah. Here’s my choices. Redeem my bottles and cans for 5 cents per can … or face a fine of $25,000 plus $100 for each bottle that I might have bought in Massachusetts or Maine or some other deposit location, and accidentally brought over the border and mixed with my regular recyclables.
You know what… it’s just not worth it any more.
Here I was, thinking I was doing my duty as a responsible citizen, returning the bottles so they could be recycled into other stuffs. Returning the bottles so I could spend gas money to make maybe $1.25 in nickel returns every week. Now I gotta worry about whether, when the bottle goes through the electronic scanner, that it might actually note that I bought a Diet Pepsi in Worcester or Portland and dared to get it redeemed in Albany?
Forget this. From now on, I’m just going to drop off the bottles at the redemption center or at the stores and not collect the deposit. I’ll put the bottles in my blue bins on trash night and let the garbage pickers and shopping cart strollers take what they want.
I don’t need to try to redeem 20,000 bottles to pay the $100 fine for that one bottle that got in the mix.
Chuck The Writer 
I’m sure you will not be alone in surrendering your nickels in the light of these draconian penalties – all those cents will add up in the pocket of…the State who have now claimed them – and introduced these discouraging policies. Desperate for income much?
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I just stumbled across this post and I can understand the policy for someone who might recycle hundreds of non-NYS deposit paid bottles at a time. But still I am appalled! So typical of New York. Charge us deposit money to get us to recycle that bottle (negative reinforcement), and then put the fear of further penalty in place at the point of redemption so we don’t collect our due back (more negative reinforcement). For those like you, who are motivated by something other than the 5 cents (the environment), this is a plus for the great State. You will take all those bottles to the redemption center and just forgo the payoff. But for many, that disincentive will turn into thousands of bottles in our landfills or hundreds of State hours sorting them out of the common rubish. I personally think we should stand our ground and demand that the machines be equipped with the ability to know which bottles are eligible to be redeemed and which are not. Or ask the redemption center staff to figure it out for us. If they can’t easily detect it by machine or person behind a counter, then really how do they enforce this absurd statute!
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