Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:51 on 2025-03-01 Permalink Reply  

• Blork 16:20 on 2025-03-01 Permalink

  I wonder how that will work in practice. I commit the crime of occasionally drinking beer at home, so every few weeks I bring the beer cans back to Provigo, where there’s a machine that eats them and spits out a ticket for the refund.

  It works in theory, but in practice it’s a huge pain. The main problem is the waiting. When I’m lucky I can just get right in there, but I’m frequently beat to the machine by people who literally have two shopping carts bulging with huge bags full of cans and bottles. There’s no point in even waiting since they will be there for so long, so I just put my cans back in the car and try another time.

  Even when I do get my kick at the can (machine), it’s not fun. At least half the time the machine fills up before I’m done, and then there’s the long and Sisyphean road towards getting some 20-year-old who doesn’t give AF about anything to empty the machine so I can proceed.

  And then there’s the rejects. Sometimes the rejects are because Provigo doesn’t sell that brand and sometimes it’s just because the machine is being a SOB.

  So that bad situation is about to become worse, as many more bottles are eligible for the refund fiasco.

  I’m not against the idea of bottle deposits (to the contrary, actually). I just wish there was an easier way to deal with it. Hopefully some third-party organizations will see the potential and will open themselves up to just taking cans and bottles in bulk, as donations, with no need for the donor to sort or count. (Then they can do the arduous task of sorting and keep the money for their charity or whatever.)

• walkerp 17:52 on 2025-03-01 Permalink

  Why don’t you just take them to the dep?

• Blork 18:00 on 2025-03-01 Permalink

  Because it’s annoying! I used to do that with bottles that are easy to count because they fit nice and snugly into a carrier. But a bag of 40 or 50 cans is like this big rattling thing that needs to be counted by hand, and the dep guy doesn’t want to do that so I get a dirty look. I’d rather just give them to someone.

• Nicholas 19:06 on 2025-03-01 Permalink

  Blork, have I got news for you! The new machines let you just dump your bag of containers into an opening, and it automatically sorts and counts them and either puts money into your account (which they send to you by Interac transfer once it hits $25) or in cash with a receipt. Unfortunately that’s only at Consignaction+ locations, of which there are few; for Consignaction without the + they just have the old style single returns or one where you print a QR code, stick it on your bag, and then push it through a hole and then they will get to it eventually and credit your account. And deps and stores under 4,000 SF no longer have to take returns, though they can.

  I wrote a long thing a while ago about how they have much better machines in the world that can handle all this stuff, such as the TORMA R1, and machines that accept cases of glass bottles automatically, scanning and counting them. I’ve used them in Europe and they’re great, but it doesn’t seem we’re there yet. But this is progress.

• Kevin 19:40 on 2025-03-01 Permalink

  IF the new machines work and going there isnt a debacle I will start bringing back my stuff.
  Otherwise I’ll just keep chucking them in the green box for the binners.

• GC 19:51 on 2025-03-01 Permalink

  Getting the deposit back can indeed be a hassle. That’s why I basically just started throwing it in with the recycling, too. If a homeless person–or one of otherwise limited means–wants to come along and claim the deposit, I feel like that’s a win because they might need it more than I do. The only flaw with this plan is the knowledge that a lot of what is being “recycled” probably isn’t recycled at all :(. I had not heard of Cosignaction, however.

• Blork 20:59 on 2025-03-01 Permalink

  Nicholas, if you’re right that’s great news. Too bad the media reports couldn’t be so specific!

• Nicholas 13:43 on 2025-03-02 Permalink

  GC, plastic is not great so I don’t know how much is being recycled, even though it is cleaner than mixed plastic and sorted by type so they say it’s being recycled. But glass bottles are reused: they’re standardized after work by the industry decades ago (except for a few imports), so they’re cleaned and reused dozens of times (you can see bits of glue from old labels on brown bottles). And aluminum is definitely being recycled. It takes about 20x the energy to smelt new aluminum than to recycle it. Aluminum is basically the best thing you can recycle, it’s incredibly environmentally friendly.

  Blork, it is, except way fewer depots are open than expected, and Kate’s original story notes that BMO isn’t lending any more money to Consignaction because they think it’s such a debacle that the government will take the monopoly contract they granted to Consignaction away. Also, if you click on the TORMA video you can see an interview with a Nordic store manager who says people come to her store because the machines are so easy to use. There’s nothing stopping stores from buying one of these machines, and the labour savings are really big; it’d be tougher for small, old, urban stores, but new builds should absolutely jump on this.

• GC 14:17 on 2025-03-02 Permalink

  That’s great to hear, Nicholas. I keep trying, hoping that nothing I put in the blue bin is going to the landfill…

• MarcG 17:00 on 2025-03-02 Permalink

  Is there any sense in putting glass into curbside recycling? I’ve watched how the trucks handle blue bags and can only imagine it’s shattered to bits by the time it gets to the sorting facility.

• Ian 17:35 on 2025-03-02 Permalink

  FWIW I have read that glass was the first material being accepted for recycling so there is a lot of infrastructure for it, and that glass and aluminum are the most readily recyclable materials. I’ve also read that besides pop bottles most plastic just ends up in landfill, and hardly anyone actually wants paper as there is so much of it, and it’s biodegradeable anyways.

• Mozai 21:26 on 2025-03-02 Permalink

  The reason why I don’t do it every time is because the two grocery stores near me that have the machines, the machines are usually broken, which means walking between them, then carrying the bag home. When they aren’t, I’m waiting in line for up to fifteen minutes for my turn to put six bottles in to get a refund ticket. I want to do my part.