CalRecycle is aiming to bolster beverage container redemption by awarding nearly $70 million in innovation grants to recyclers, community organizations and supermarkets.
The agency says this will support more than 250 new recycling sites across 30 counties. The grants exists to help pay startup costs for recycling programs — specifically for recycling centers, mobile recycling, reverse vending machines or bag drop programs.
“Innovative ways to recycle will help more Californians cash in their beverage containers and provide recycled materials for in-state remanufacturers,” CalRecycle Director Zoe Heller said in a statement Tuesday. “These new sites will make redemption as simple as feeding containers into a machine or dropping off a bag of empty containers.”
Nearly all of those counties are getting reverse vending machines, an increasingly popular method at college campuses, stadiums and other venues to recover material.
In California, a bottle bill state, some of those RVMs will be hosted by Save Mart and Smart and Final grocery stores in 19 counties. The supermarket chains will each receive more than $2 million to fund the purchase and installation of the machines at 91 store locations.
“These grant partnerships between recycling centers and supermarkets can help retailers meet their redemption requirements and give Californians a convenient option to cash in their empty containers where they shop for CRV beverages,” CalRecycle spokesperson Lance Klug said in an email.
The list of innovation grant recipients also includes the city and county of San Francisco, CRV Recycle Center, Cal Pac Recycling and Sunset Recycling, among others.
CalRecycle also highlighted allocations in “underserved counties,” such as Butte, Imperial, Lassen, Mendocino and Merced, including via mobile recycling operations in areas without redemption opportunities, which are expected to launch in 2025.
In this round, CalRecycle funded 37 requests out of a total 125 applications seeking nearly $219 million. The maximum grant award was $300,000 for a community service program application and $3 million for other single applications.
California is placing more onus on large beverage retailers going forward, following a 2022 law. Such retailers will be required to register with CalRecycle beginning Jan. 1, 2025. Those not served by a recycling center will have to either stand up an in-store redemption system or create a “dealer cooperative” with other retailers.
This is just one of several ongoing upgrades to California’s bottle bill, which was passed in 1986. As of this year, redemption programs must now accept newly added containers such as wine, spirits and 100% fruit juice and any size of vegetable juice. CalRecycle also modernized how it processes payments to redemption centers.
CalRecycle noted in a Tuesday announcement that more funding is expected in the coming year, including $138 million for more redemption innovation grants, $50 million for beverage container quality infrastructure grants and $25 million for reusable beverage container recycling infrastructure grants.
Megan Quinn contributed reporting to this story.
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