It's still sort of common in places with deposits on cans. In Michigan, I had a few friends growing up who did it to help their families. They got in trouble with the school on multiple occasions for digging them out of the trash, and what the school said implied it was that the school was profiting off the cans themselves. The episode of Seinfeld where they try to bring bottles to Michigan for the deposit always gives me a familiar feeling.
Actually, this article is about New York, so there should be a deposit there too, which explains why it's feasible.
I've always been surprised that other states do not have bottle returns inside stores. What I used to routinely do in Michigan -- bring some cans with me to the grocery store -- I have never done in California, since you have to travel to a recycling center with limited hours.
Yeah, returns in stores is what's done in Norway as well and while varying over time return rates have regularly been around 95%.
It's structured as a tax on single-use containers that retailers can buy themselves free from based on the proportion they can demonstrate returns for, coupled with a shared recycling scheme they can join.
In practice it means you can return containers wherever you can buy them, and most larger grocery stores have machines to handle returns. (In fact, the largest manufacturer of "reverse vending machines" for bottles is Norwegian TOMRA).
Recycling rates in places without bottle returns in stores basically shows that just having recycling centres or even curb-side recycling from home is woefully insufficient if you're serious about dealing with plastic waste.
I don't understand it either. It gets people to clean up litter and gives a lot of small handouts as rewards for keeping the state clean. There's probably overhead we don't see as consumers but it seems pretty beneficial to me.
Actually, this article is about New York, so there should be a deposit there too, which explains why it's feasible.