Why Californians do not recover their beverage container deposits
Dalia Gomez teaches young pugilists art of self-defense in socially distant classes each week
Good luck these days getting your bottle and can deposits back in California. Those willing to go the extra mile for their nickels and dimes find redemption centers shuttered or the lines hours long. Out of 58 counties, 31 have five or fewer redemption centers still open.
And beverage retailers that signed up to be a last resort are illegally turning away up to twothirds of consumers trying to redeem inside stores.
But the real culprits are waste haulers and the state. The haulers collect empties, and the deposits on those beverage containers, put in curbside recycling bins because consumers have nowhere else to go. And the state dramatically overpays those haulers for contaminating and landfilling them.
In successful systems like those in Oregon, Michigan and Vermont, consumers have wide access to convenient reverse vending machines and automated drop-off points that take empties. This enables consumers to get back up to 89% of their deposits.
But Californians get back little more than half of the $1.5 billion they pay each year in checkout lines. Much of the rest goes to waste haulers and redemption centers.
In 2017, haulers operating recycling programs were paid $170 million by the state for container recycling. But they recycled only 12% of the containers in the program, according to analysis of state data by the nonprofit Container Recycling Institute. Redemption centers, however, were paid only $155 million for handling 88% of the containers.
That’s in part why redemption centers have closed in droves, leaving consumers with few places to get their deposits back. Supermarkets and other retailers legally required to redeem deposit containers when there are no redemption centers nearby lack financial incentives to do so.
Meanwhile, waste haulers reap a windfall. California pays them 20 times their costs for separating materials at giant sorting facilities, according to an unpublished 2018 report CalRecycle ordered and Consumer Watchdog obtained via a Public Records Act request.
Waste haulers and state politicians like it this way. Billiondollar companies such as Recology, Republic Services and Waste Management donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to California politicians to keep the gravy train going.
Waste haulers’ “single stream” curbside collection bins defeat the purpose of the state bottle recycling system. Empty beverage containers get tossed in with greasy pizza boxes and sticky peanut butter jars. In transit, garbage trucks jostle loads, break bottles and lace contamination throughout. By the time loads exit giant sorting plants, at least a quarter of empty beverage containers get landfilled.
Adding insult to injury, California is the only state that pays haulers for processing these empties and the only state that allows them to keep the container deposits. The dirty truth is waste haulers want our bottle deposits, but not a functioning redemption system.
A system this deformed deprives in-state manufacturers of clean materials to make new containers and increases landfilling, litter and greenhouse gas emissions from making new products from scratch. This defeats Gov. Gavin Newsom’s call for a “circular economy” that treats waste as an economic resource to be reduced, reused or remanufactured.
That is why lawmakers must pass Senate Bill 38, authored by Sen. Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont. The bill hands responsibility for recycling empty containers to the companies that make, distribute and sell the beverages.
As other states have shown, setting a high redemption target and letting an industry consortium keep unclaimed deposits results in modernized systems with high redemption rates.
Giving the beverage industry that profits off the beverages the responsibility to recycle their wrappers will get the bottle deposit program back on track. Only then will California have a true circular economy and be a true climate leader.
The most stunning global event last week was the historic meeting of Pope Francis with Shiite Ayatollah Ali alSistani in a small, bare room in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq.
I say that not just because of the pope’s bravery in attempting to protect the remnants of Iraq’s ancient Christian sects, whose numbers have dwindled from around 1.5 million to 250,000, under attacks from ISIS and other violent Islamist extremists since the 2003 U.S. invasion. At age 84, the pope’s journey to Iraq was not for the fainthearted.
Nor do I say it only because the ailing 94-year-old Sistani stood to greet the pope and joined him in condemning extremism.
No, this trip symbolized something much more significant, at a time when the world is convulsed by xenophobic nationalism, ugly strains of populism and deep cracks within democratic political systems. It was a desperate last plea by global religious moderates for justice and peace.
Both these religious leaders have promoted the rights of oppressed religious and ethnic groups, along with democratic political rule. But they have been challenged by hard-liners within their own religion and sects and by populist, authoritarian politicians. Their joint appearance was a poignant plea — perhaps a last stand — for values that are under increasing global threat.
I have walked the narrow alley in Najaf off which Sistani lives. (He almost never receives visitors.) There is no question that he chooses to live humbly, avoiding any trappings of power. And don’t be fooled by the photo of the two men in which the cleric looked wraith-like — he still wields immense religious power.
While Shiites comprise only around 15% of all Muslims, the vast majority of whom are Sunnis (they differ over the proper succession to the prophet Muhammad), Iran and Iraq are predominantly Shiite.
And Sistani is the preeminent Shiite ayatollah, leader of a school of religious thought that opposes involvement of clerics in political leadership. Thus he opposes the rule by clerics practiced in Shiite Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution — and has endorsed constitutional elections in Iraq.
I was in Iraq in 2005 when the first national elections were held when posters all over Baghdad featured photos of the ayatollah telling Iraqis, especially his Shiite followers, to go to the polls. But unlike, say, the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq, he supported subsequent elections. He has also supported youthful Iraqi demonstrators protesting corruption in government, including within Shiite political parties.
And Sistani, along with his religious establishment in Najaf, urged his followers to fight ISIS and protect Christians from persecution.
So when Sistani reaffirmed the right of Iraq’s “Christian citizens to live like all other Iraqis in safety and with their full constitutional rights” this was not just pabulum. Similarly, when Francis urged Iraqis — after years of sectarian war — to show that “fraternity is more durable than fratricide,” his plea was backed up by personal risk.
A former Jesuit, Francis has campaigned all over the world for the poor and the marginalized, and even once washed the feet of Muslim asylumseekers. He has criticized the growth of nationalist populism in Europe, and warned that it could lead to a new Hitler. And he called former President Donald Trump “not Christian” for his anti-migrant rhetoric. The one time he met Trump he gave him a treatise on climate change.
The pope has been criticized by religious conservatives. And his campaign to convince the Iraqi Christian community to remain is probably too late.
I went to Christmas services in 2004 at one of several Baghdad churches that was later blown up. I visited Christian refugees in the Kurdish capital Erbil, who fled to that more tolerant region from Baghdad and the Nineveh plains, fleeing violence and ISIS massacres. Although sustained by charity, many feel they have no future in the country.
And yet, the sight of these two clerics endorsing pluralism is moving. When Sistani dies, Iran will try to exert more influence over Iraqi Shiites. And Pope Francis’ Vatican campaign for the poor may or may not outlast his papacy after he dies.
They have set down the markers, and tried their best in Najaf. Now it’s up to us.
OAKLAND >> Sneakers landing between the rungs of agility ladders squeak across the tennis courts at San Antonio Park just after 4:15 p.m. every weekday. This is the drill that Dalia Gomez instructs more than a dozen student boxers ages 5 to 18 to warm up with as she critiques their footwork and takes a headcount.
To those who show up, “Coach G,” is a community leader from Oxnard, a pugilism mecca she calls “Boxnard.” She founded the nonprofit Vertical Skillz Outreach in 2004 on a mission to empower youngsters through health and life skills training and travel experiences. Gomez knew she wanted to work with kids given the role coaches played in her own upbringing.
“I know that I am one of the an