Bottle deposit bills

[lhall]

My state, Tennessee, is considering implementing a bottle deposit law. It would impose a 5 cents tax on each bottle and can sold at retail, and beverage distributors would also be taxed one cent for every unit sold. Has anyone out there gone through the addition of a bottle deposit law?

[HubCity]

First off let me say that I feel sorry for you already as this might end up being a pain in the butt for you. This will all depend on the full reading of the law.

Being in Iowa, we got to deal with the bottle deposit law here since we started up. Basically the way it works in Iowa is the distributor tacks on the 5 cent bottle deposit then must pay the redemption center 6 cents back for each bottle/can of their product returned. You will probably have to have the 5 cent redemption added to your label I'm sure as will anyone else distributing beer into Tennessee.

The most effect this may have on you (other than the labels) will be if you retail out product as you may have to take back the bottles from consumers that return them to your facility. If this is the case I suggest having another small storage area as these will come back in all manner of conditions and can be a sanitation issue. We have a shed full of rubber totes that we store them in until we have enough to take a full pickup load to the recycle center.

More or less here it is a pain in the butt for everyone and the extra man hours add a bit of expense to the distributors that I'm sure will get built into the price. We work with a wine distributor here and they have full time guys that do nothing but open wine cases and mark bottles all day long with 5 cent IA redemption stickers. All in all pushing recycling would be better than redemption in my opinion.

[gitchegumee]

I came from Michigan where deposits on cans & bottles began. And still lead the nation at $0.10 each. At first, beer companies hated the idea, but when they received 10 cents for each can/bottle and did NOT get back all those containers they stumbled into a windfall. Then they embraced it. Now we have machines in grocery stores that suck up your empty can/bottle and print a receipt that you take to the checkout and redeem for money. And our roads don't have beverage containers strewn all over them. I like the deposit idea. Our European and Asian counterparts do it as a rule--with plastic case carriers to boot.

Now I'm elsewhere. Beer bottles cost me $0.46 each delivered here in the tropics. I implemented a deposit scheme where I charge my customers an additional $0.15 per beer more as a way of helping cover packaging costs. I allow them to redeem empty, clean bottles at the same $0.15 each when they return them. We have a dish washing machine that gives them a hot cleaning before we store them for reuse. On reuse, we soak in sanitizer and rinse before filling and labeling. We have small volume on bottles. Maybe 6 cases returned per day. We can do it easily. Hope you can too. Good luck!