Deposits on soda pop bottles

[hbelkins]

Since we went to slightly more general recycling...
NYS also has a deposit on car batteries. The way it works is once you buy a new lead-acid battery, store charges you extra $5 and hands out separate receipt for that.
Once you bring an old battery for recycling to the same store, you get those $5 back with that receipt - just bringing an old battery without buying a new one doesn't work. As far as I understand, lead in the battery is worth a lot more than $5.

The battery core charge in Kentucky is $10. And the way I understand, you can bring in more than one battery and get $10 for each one.

[Scott5114]

If trash has a value (such a aluminum cans) the free market will take care of it.  No deposit required.

It already does.

In Norman, the city has a contract with a recycling company. The company is required to pick up the recycling of everyone in town, at home. Then they sort the recyclables and sell the raw materials off to companies that do the actual recycling. They profit by getting more for the raw materials than it cost to pick them up and sort them.

Does the city pay the recycler (as Ft Smith does) or does the recycler pay for the privilege?

I'm not sure, but there is a $3 surcharge added onto the water bill, so I assume the city pays the recycling company.

I heard that residential recycling rarely pays for itself until you consider landfill capacity as part of equation. Cans may be better than anything else, though.

It depends on what you mean by "pays for itself". Recycling most things is cheaper than manufacturing virgin materials. However, whether or not one can break even on a recycling program is another question.

My understanding is that most recycling programs would break even or even profit, but for the fact that most of them accept glass. Glass is recyclable, but is such a pain to deal with (because, get this, it breaks) that it ends up costing so much to deal with in terms of labor and extra processing to keep the broken glass from contaminating the other materials that it ends up tanking the whole program's profitability.