Monday, September 21, 2009

Surprise, surprise, California CRV tax rate going up and applying to more packaging

[caption id="attachment_2292" align="alignright" width="164" caption="CA is most likely to raise the CRV tax because of the legislation pulling money out of the account to spend elsewhere."]CA is most likely to raise the CRV tax because of the legislation pulling money out of the account to spend elsewhere.[/caption]

The John & Ken Show on KFI AM 640 revealed  September 15th about the California Redemption Value going up.  Chuck DeVore, an assemblyman in Orange County came on the show to clarify what changes are going into effect.

Basically the bill is going to be increasing the CRV deposit on all sodas, and now the bill will also apply to Juice containers, among other similar containers. The bill is expected to rake in another $2 billion dollars next year.

  • Expands CA's version of the bottle deposit

  • Bill has been expanded to Vegetable, Fruit, Rice, Soy and Milk containers

  • Increased the fee to the manufacturers that produce these products from 4 to 5 cents for the smaller containers, and from 9 to 10 cents for the larger (20-24oz sized) containers...Which of course the manufacturers aren't going to eat the costs, so that's passed on to us.

  • Due to the complexity of this bill, a lot of CA republican legislators were divided when it came to the passing of this bill

  • The reasoning behind the rate going up is because for the past few years, the CA legislators decided that pulling half a billion dollars from the California Redemption Rate using this money for other things including stuff having to do with greenhouse gas reductions, 22 million to the local conservation core, as well as the general fund.

  • The money for the CRV account was originally supposed to go to the system recycle those products.

  • Due to the deficit of the CRV account, CA legislators feel that they need to up the CRV cost of consumers to get back money lost from the outside spending.


As a resident of California, this sort of shit pisses me off.  For starters, we're paying extra money towards a program with the idea that this CRV money is actually being used to run the system to recycle those products.  Apparently not.  Secondly, John & Ken did bring up a valid point: by increasing the value you get back from the cans, it provides you (the customer) more incentive to spend the time to turn in those cans to a recycling center to get your money back;  however they don't want you to do that because they don't get the money when you yourself take the time recycle your cans.  They want you to throw them out in the recycled trash that gets picked up every week... That's how they make their money.

The program is flawed.

[audio:http://mitalis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/ca-crv-tax-bill-increase.mp3]