13 December—If you have any bottles and cans you’ve paid a nickel deposit on and can possibly wait until 1 January 2024 (that’s not even three weeks away) to return the empties to where you bought them—or another retailer that sells the same product in an identical container—you can get a dime back. That’s a hundred-percent profit.

The 5-cent difference will essentially be paid out of the unclaimed—unredeemed— deposits currently shared by the state and beverage distributors. The retailers are reimbursed for the amount they redeem at, so don’t worry about doing your needy supermarket chain out of nickels.

Certainly it’s a bloody nuisance to accumulate the containers even in small quantities and deposit them in what the state calls “reverse vending machines.” But it’s a hundred-percent profit for you—for this short period, anyway.

And the reverse vending machines likely as not will be full or not working. In that case, the merchants—dealers, as the state calls them—will have to redeem the spent containers over the counter. You shouldn’t have a problem—even if you don’t wash out the containers. While statute says containers to be redeemed may not contain foreign matter, like cigarette butts or snirt, the law doesn’t require them to be washed or emptied of their original contents. The RVMs don’t know the difference in all events. (But the floors of the RVM rooms do.)

If the reverse vending machines can’t read bar codes or the containers are bent out of shape and the machines reject them, the merchants must nevertheless redeem them. But if the bar codes aren’t compatible with Connecticut statute, you’re out of luck.

As things stand now, on any one trip you can stick as many bottles and cans in the reverse vending machines as you want. But come 1 January you’ll be limited to 240 containers on any given visit. There are good reasons for that, customer (redeemer) convenience and to thwart potentially criminal abuse.

Redeeming bottles and cans is certainly a pain in the ass for us, but it’s even more of a pain for the dealers and distributors. We have a choice; dealers and distributors don’t—and they have burdensome paperwork to boot. The state insists the deposit-redemption cycle is intended primarily to reduce the environmental scourge of discarded containers. And it pretty well succeeds therein. But we know the real purpose is to fill the state’s coffers with unredeemed deposits.

Remember, everything politicians do is intended first and foremost to get and then keep them in office—and it takes money to do that . . .