Oregon Public Broadcasting

In Oregon, you have to put down a nickel deposit when you buy beer or soda. Next year water joins that list. But if lawmakers have their way, you’d be paying deposits on a lot more stuff.  Correspondent Chris Lehman has more.

When you turn in your old soda or beer cans, they probably end up here.

This processing center in northwest Portland takes in some three million containers a day.  About two-thirds are cans.

The center’s director, John Andersen, points to a towering stack of aluminum bales, each weighing about a thousand pounds.

John Andersen:  “We ship out oh, probably two rail cars a week on average throughout the year.  Most of it goes to the Midwest and is melted back down into new aluminum cans.”

Soon the facility will be processing empty water bottles, too. But some Oregon lawmakers want to go much further than that.  So they created a task force to come with a proposal.

Task force members came to the plant to get a first-hand look at the issues.  The big one?  Concerns of retailers.

They hand out the nickels to people with cans and bottles to turn in.  Task force member Jerry Powell says expanding the bottle bill would be a logistical nightmare.

Jerry Powell:   “Grocers would be slammed if we added juices, if we added Gatorade, if we added iced teas and coffees, and on and on.  I would see a situation where we would actually allow grocers not to redeem, and we would move redemption to redemption centers.”

Those would be stand alone centers that would serve an entire neighborhood or town.  That’s how California does it.

Another idea under consideration is raising the deposit to ten cents.  The only state with an across-the-board dime deposit now is Michigan.