California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle)

Beverage Container Recycling

Welcome to California’s Beverage Container Recycling Program. Whether you’re a consumer who wants to redeem your empty bottles and cans for cash, a recycling center operator who needs the latest industry updates, or anyone else with an interest in beverage container recycling, you’ll find the information you need on these pages.

CalRecycle, officially known as the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, administers the California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act. Beverage containers covered under the act are subject to California Redemption Value (CRV), which is 5 cents for containers less than 24 ounces, 10 cents for containers 24 ounces or larger. Thanks to the CRV cash incentive, nearly 300 billion aluminum, glass, and plastic beverage containers have been recycled since the program began in 1987.

Californians Recycle

  • California Redemption Value
    Consumers pay California Redemption Value (CRV) when they purchase beverages from a retailer, and receive CRV refunds when they redeem the containers at a recycling center. Most beverages packaged in aluminum, glass, plastic and bi-metal containers are eligible for CRV. Notable exceptions are milk, wine and distilled spirits, which are not included in the CRV program. CRV is 5 cents for each beverage container less than 24 ounces and 10 cents for each container 24 ounces or greater.
  • Find A Nearby Recycling Center
    Just enter your ZIP code to find a bottle & can redemption center near you.
  • Recycling Rates
    Biannual Report of Beverage Container Sales, Returns, Redemption, and Recycling Rates (posted 5/10/13)  PDF Version (237 KB).
  • Californians Recycle
    Californians bought more than 21 billion carbonated and noncarbonated CRV-eligible drinks in aluminum, glass, plastic, and bi-metal containers in 2012. More than 17.2 billion of those containers were recycled, saving natural resources, conserving energy, extending the life of our landfills, and helping to reduce emissions of harmful greenhouse gases.
 

Important Info for DORIIS UsersNew

On Monday May 20, 2013, CalRecycle’s Division of Recycling Integrated Information System (DORIIS) experienced a service disruption. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused and want to assure DORIIS users we are taking this very seriously. We have spent a considerable amount of time getting to the root of the outage in order to prevent it from happening again.

The troubleshooting we have done has isolated the problem and we believe the remedy will prevent the same problem from occurring again. The root cause of this particular issue was indirectly related to technical configuration changes made during a system upgrade several months ago.

It is important to note that uptime for the DORIIS automated system during core business hours (8-5, M-F) over the past two years has been 99.7%, so overall reliability for DORIIS has been very good. Still, it is our objective to make DORIIS as available and reliable as possible for our customers. We are working toward that goal, and we appreciated your patience as we worked to resolve this recent problem.

We are committed to continuing to improve the functionality, reliability and performance of DORIIS and welcome your feedback.

Thank you.

 
 
Last updated: !-- #BeginEditable "LastUpdatedOn" --> MMay 24, 2013
Beverage Container Recycling, a href="http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/BevContainer/">http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/BevContainer/
Contacts: http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/BevContainer/Contacts.htm