Courts

One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Fraud Prosecution?

Reduce, Reuse, Face Jail Time?

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money briefcaseRecycling is good. Recycling more is better, right? Well, the devil is in the details. If we’re talking a couple of cents here and a couple of cents there, nobody really cares — people literally just throw the cans away. But get a couple hundred or thousand cans together and the profits become far from negligible. And where there’s money to be made, there are usually a couple regulations to be aware of. A California family is about to find that out the hard way. From Yahoo!:

A California family that earned millions of dollars just by recycling cans and bottles has now been accused of multiple felonies that could lead to years behind bars.

In a felony complaint filed this month, state prosecutors charged eight family members in Riverside County with defrauding the state by importing used bottles and cans from Arizona — some 178 tons in 8 months — and recycling them in California.

California has a recycling program and this family has been bringing in tons of material. Streets are cleaner, so what? As it turns out, there’s a reason recycling in California is so profitable.

When someone purchases a plastic or aluminum bottle in California, they typically pay an extra 5 to 10 cents in “California Redemption Value,” or CRV, which the consumer can get back by returning the items to one of the state’s more than 1,200 recycling centers. Arizona has no such program.

“California’s recycling program is funded by consumers, and helps protect our environment and our communities,” Bonta said. “Those who try to undermine its integrity through criminal operations will be held accountable.”

As far as the prosecutors see it, it’s less Captain Planet and more abusing a state’s rebate system by bringing in foreign bottles. To make matters worse, they’re also alleging that the family double dipped and cashed in bottles that had already been redeemed in California. Novice that I am, I always just assumed that the bottles were immediately crushed or melted down after the recycling center paid for them. Given the clear financial incentives at play here, you’d think California would be better at keeping its empty Pepsi cans under lock, no?

One Family Pocketed $7.6 Million By Taking Cans And Bottles From Arizona And Recycling Them In California. That’s Fraud, Prosecutors Say. [Yahoo!]

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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