Let's Make A Deal

Hey guys,

So I turned in a haul over the weekend, and I decided to do a closer inspection of my recyclables.

Some of you might be curious how fair the payouts by weight are. If you've been wondering how they convert per-piece prices ($0.05 cents a container, $0.10 if large) to per-pound prices, you're not alone. Let me clarify:

The photo below shows three different container, all of which were taxed at the same (5 cent) CRV rate:


However, it's clear that they are not all the same weight. The bottle on the left is an examples of the new "Eco-Shape". These bottles use less plastic- good for the environment, but bad if you're getting paid by the pound. The bottle in the middle weighed roughly twice as much (by just feeling it unscientifically). The miniature bottle on the right was somewhere in between.

I get paid $0.96 cents per pound, which assumes that there are roughly 19 bottles per pound. I'm guessing that the price is sent down from the State, because they are the "banker" in this scenario. The recycling center is really just a sort of middle-man in moving the recyclables back towards reuse.

So, when I dropped of my bottles this time I decided to do an exhaustive count first to compare with my payout. I counted 116 bottles (counting twice for large bottles), which would come out to $5.80. When weighed, I got $5.28. This means that I got underpaid by 52 cents, or roughly 9%.

I suppose that this is within a reasonable margin of error, and if I worked on getting huge containers, I could easily be overpaid. Either way, it's something to think about.

-Charles