Glass wine, spirit bottles among new beverage containers to be accepted for California redemption credit in 2024

Hoping to keep millions more recyclables off the streets and out of the landfill, state officials have expanded the range of beverage containers eligible for redemption credit starting next year — including, for the first time, wine and distilled spirits bottles.

With the season of mass indulgence just ahead, the timing could not be better.

Effective Jan. 1, consumers can earn 5 or 10 cents for each clean wine or liquor bottle emptied over the holidays and turned in at certified redemption sites, depending on the container’s size.

They also can earn cash for a greater variety of large fruit and vegetable juice bottles, some of which had been excluded from the program until now.

In a radical move for the state’s nearly four-decade-old Bottle Bill, box, bladder and pouch packaging for wine and spirits will be accepted, as well — redeemable for a quarter.

If every eligible item were redeemed, an estimated 500 million more containers would be recycled each year instead of landing in the trash bin or on the streets as litter, officials said.

The change in recyclable containers is being made under two state laws approved by the Legislature reforming the state recycling program to improve the availability of redemption opportunities.

Program changes go far beyond merely expanding the range of recyclables acceptable for redemption and will be especially evident locally.

The state is investing $285 million in new funding to support innovation and growth intended to increase convenience and opportunity for container redemption so that anyone who pays the deposit attached to the cost of beverages sold in California has the chance to get it back, as the system intended.

Some of the newer technologies are headed to Sonoma County soon, including a system utilized in Oregon that allows consumers to bring recyclable materials to redemption centers outside of regular business hours.

The bag drop program employs specific bags with scannable tags that include consumer identification and account information, allowing workers who receive them to credit the proper account through director deposit or payment app, said Sloane Pagal, program manager for Zero Waste Sonoma, the county’s waste management agency. The tag prompts the collection box to open for deposit of recyclable containers, and a sensor alerts the operator when it’s full, Pagal said.

“The intention is to make it an automatic process, eventually,” Pagal said.

Sonoma County, which once had 24 redemption centers and now has six, was chosen a few years ago as an underserved county to receive state funding for program expansion.

Most of the sites are run by United Cerebral Palsy of the North Bay, which also operates the Petaluma Recycling Center, where it accepts large loads of recyclable beverage containers as well as other materials.

The nonprofit has opened four sites over the past two years in Sebastopol, Healdsburg, Rohnert Park and Windsor. Each is open two or three days a week and has been very successful, said Dennis Blong, project manager for United Cerebral Palsy of the North Bay.

“We fill up our trucks every single day, and a lot of the time, we fill them up twice a day,” he said.

The first drop off box would probably be installed at its center in Rohnert Park, likely some time next year, Blong said.

He said the organization already is looking for a larger location for its central recycling center in Petaluma, in anticipation of handling a much greater volume or recyclable containers.

It already has acquired a “densifier” machine that crushes aluminum cans and turns them into stackable cubes. It’s also investing in new baling equipment for plastic bottles and new sorting lines.

“We just need a new facility to put all this material in because we just can’t do it in Petaluma,” he said. “It’s too small.”

The ultimate goal is to funnel more items toward recycling and reuse in order to diminish not just single-use products but single-use resources, said Rachel Machi Wagoner, director of the state Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, or CalRecycle.

Glass, in particular, “is an infinitely recyclable material,” Wagoner said, and can be turned repeatedly into something new using far less energy and resulting in lower emissions than creating a glass object from scratch.

Merely recycling an item “is not the same thing as it getting turned into something of value,” she said.

Part of that effort will be driven by state laws that increasingly require manufacturers to reuse materials at a greater level.

Offering people incentives to turn in recyclable containers at redemption centers improves the chances those items will be recycled, as experts say materials tossed into mixed-use, curbside bins are more likely to be soiled and, thus, taken off the path to reuse in new products.

But people should not be discouraged from utilizing curbside recycling “if that’s what works best for them,” Wagoner said.

Many folks, particularly in remote and rural areas, don’t have regular pickup of recyclables at their homes, however. Even some developed areas have fewer than they need, particularly after the closure of hundreds of sites in 2019 and 2020.

Those in the industry say a key challenge has been the fluctuation in the price of recycled material on which redemption site operators depend to operate their businesses.

CalRecycle provides subsidies to help stabilize market fluctuations but has historically based those on a 12-year average of material values, so if plastic prices dropped, for instance, it could be up to a year before that was reflected in the subsidy operators needed to stay in business.

“That’s really important, because traditionally you had to wait a year to get your redemption price modified,” Blong said.

New provisions also will require retail marketers to step to the plate and improve their container redemption performance, in part through new dealer coop systems that will be required beginning in 2025 for those that don’t have redemption sites nearby or accept recyclable containers on their own.

“This is a big step toward cutting our state’s waste stream while uplifting our recycling program,” state Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, who authored or co-authored two recent bills expanding the California container recycling program, said in an October news release. “This new law reduces the amount of recyclables we put into landfills, provides a financial lifeline to recyclers, and maximizes consumers’ options for redeeming deposits on beverage containers.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan (she/her) at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On X/Twitter @MaryCallahanB.