Rising wages and other costs forced Damon’s Beverage to close three of its five bottle and can redemption centers in Maine over the past two years.
General Manager Dave Makson expects two current legislative bills, one raising handling fees and the other bringing efficiency measures to the redemption process, to help businesses like Damon’s. He estimated the extra money from the handling fees alone could help Damon’s stay in business another six years.
“For about two years we’ve been yelling from the rooftops because our labor cost doubled and our revenue stayed the same,” Makson said. “We closed three locations because they were losing money.”
Damon’s isn’t alone in closing redemption locations in Waterville, Augusta and Skowhegan, with one in Bangor and a second location in Waterville remaining open. Since the end of 2019, some 53 redemption centers have closed across the state, leaving only 321, Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, said while presenting the handling fee bill he sponsored to a committee this year.
The changes amount to one of the biggest overhauls in years for Maine’s “bottle bill,” which was among the first in the nation when it was passed by voters in 1976 and implemented two years later.
The handling fee bill, adopted in June, increased the reimbursement to a dealer or redemption center for the cost of handling beverage containers by 1 cent per container to 5 1/2 cents starting May 1 and up another 1/2 cent to 6 cents per container beginning Sept. 1.
The handling fee differs from the 5-cent refund consumers get on a soda bottle, addressing the amount of work and money needed to sort and process the returned containers. The higher reimbursement rates will require $450,000 more in state funding in the current fiscal year, a total that is expected to rise going forward.
The other bill aims to streamline the redemption process that started 45 years ago with the introduction of the “bottle bill” to reduce litter using a deposit system to encourage recycling by Mainers. The bill has been funded by the budget committee and is expected to be approved by the Legislature next week.
Makson said it will help Damon’s more quickly handle plastic bottles and cans that are hand-sorted. It sorts about a million containers per month, and about 80 percent go through machines. The bill will be even more helpful to smaller redemption centers that sort everything by hand, he said.
Currently, hand sorting at centers without automated sorting machines requires staff to separate the various containers by size, shape and composition into 250 bins to determine which manufacturer gets charged for redemption of its drink container.
The efficiency bill would narrow that down to about four large bins with bottles from different drink manufacturers commingled, Makson said, for example, one for all clear plastic and another for non-clear plastic. The state would determine what percentage each manufacturer pays based on how much product they sell in Maine, he said.
“It’s a game-changer,” Makson said of the bill.