Jenna Jambeck was the keynote at this year’s Resource Recycling Conference and Trade Show, held in late summer. | Resource Recycling Conference/Brian Adams Photography
The statistic has taken on almost household familiarity: 91% of plastic ever created has not been recycled, and a massive amount has become litter. Jenna Jambeck, a researcher who helped formulate that number, recently spoke about solutions to the pollution problem.
In 2017, the Oregon program doubled its deposit value from 5 cents per container to 10 cents. | Courtesy of OBRC.
Oregon’s container deposit system achieved an 81% redemption rate last year, significantly higher than the previous full-year figure. The increase comes after the deposit value doubled.
The longest-running container deposit program in the country expects to hit its highest redemption rate in years, shortly after the program doubled its deposit to 10 cents.
On Monday, RePlanet shut down completely and terminated its entire workforce throughout California. | Graham Corney/Shutterstock
RePlanet, once the largest operator of facilities redeeming containers covered by the California Redemption Value (CRV) program, has shuttered. The move will significantly reduce consumer recycling access.
Oregon was the first state in the U.S. to implement a beverage container deposit/refund system, rolling out its program in 1972. Since then, the system has shown it can keep on a path of continuous improvement.
Experts say a deposit system for non-alcoholic beverage containers would complement a Canadian province’s curbside recycling system, by cutting costs and increasing the volume of material recycled each year.
New York state lawmakers declined to expand the state’s container deposit program to include additional beverages, but they approved a ban on single-use plastic bags.
Recycling stakeholders are pushing back against a container deposit expansion proposal in New York state, stating it will injure recycling programs when they’re already struggling with a down market.
Container deposit fraud allegations against a Waste Management subsidiary in California were settled for $1.1 million last summer.
