Imagine this: A car is cruising down a Connecticut road, its roof covered with bags of tied-down bottles and soda cans. If the car is sporting an out-of-state license plate, its driver could be on the road to a big pay day.
Since Connecticut started offering a more generous deposit in January, anecdotal evidence shows that’s happening. Vehicles are crossing over the state border to make a quick buck by cashing in cans and bottles purchased out of state, state officials said.
“We have heard stories about vehicles coming into Connecticut, to redemption points, from New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York,” said Chris Nelson, an official with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “Basically, trucks and cars filled with containers coming in with plates from those states.”
Since Connecticut upped its refund for cans and bottles from five cents to 10 cents, the state is a bit of an outlier in the Northeast. Neighboring Massachusetts and New York only offer a five-cent refund. Rhode Island and New Jersey do not offer bottle refunds.
‘It’s fraud, basically’
A little basic math shows the problem.
Buy a soda and pay a nickel deposit in New York (or even worse, no deposit in neighboring Rhode Island), and a quick drive into Connecticut yields a 10-cent refund.
“You can see where people might see a business opportunity there,” said Wayne Pesce, president of the Connecticut Food Association, which represents retail grocers and suppliers across the state. “Bring back a couple thousand units at a dime a unit, it’s well worth the trip.”
Refunds are issued for cans, which out-of-state buyers never paid a deposit on in Connecticut in the first place, he said.
“It’s fraud, basically,” Pesce said. “The state loses, the manufacturer loses, consumers lose when there's not a deposit on a product and it's brought in from another state.”
Environmental officials highlighted the issue in a recent public meeting, but cautioned evidence of cross-border redemption fraud remains anecdotal.
“We don’t have access to any quantifiable data that would speak to amounts of cross-border fraud that might actually be occurring,” Nelson said in an email.
Still, evidence is rolling in. Environmental officials shared a photo of an allegedly out-of-state car, its roof loaded with cans. Nelson said the photo was shared with DEEP by a Connecticut resident.
A bigger issue in Fairfield County
The issue of cross-border bottle redemptions is particularly acute in lower Fairfield County in southwestern Connecticut, Pesce said.
He blamed a lack of private redemption centers in that area, high population density and close proximity to the New York border, which he said is putting a pinch on grocery retailers reluctant to confront an out-of-state customer hauling in bags of cans for a refund.
“We're seeing New Jersey license plates at retailers in Fairfield County and in the Danbury area,” he said. “The idea of confronting a consumer in any way, shape or form today is probably out of the question – and certainly not a management routine that we are going to endorse.”
Earlier this year, Connecticut’s legislature passed a bill to address the cross-border cans for cash issue, which makes it illegal to get a refund in Connecticut for a can purchased out of state.
But it’s kind of difficult to enforce, Nelson said.
“Because you’d have to catch someone in the act and prove that these containers were not purchased in Connecticut,” he said.
Meanwhile, grocers have limited how many cans can be redeemed in machines and posted signs warning customers that cross-border frauds are illegal, but Pesce said the signs are “kind of a water sandwich.”
“They did change the law, but it’s really not a deterrent,” he said.
A potential fix
One possible solution, Pesce suggested, is asking people with a lot of bottles to give personal information, like their name or license number, when returning containers.
“There’s got to be some skin in the game in terms of collecting information on people that we think are cheating,” Pesce said. “And that doesn’t exist.”
At the moment, Nelson said state resources are targeted more toward violations that pose a bigger risk to human health and safety.
But officials are still raising concern about cross-border returns and urging people to stop doing it.
“It puts a burden on Connecticut retailers,” Nelson said. “The volume coming in — because there’s a lot of stuff coming from out-of-state — it overwhelms their storage capacity.”
