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Josh Crane: From Vermont Public and the NPR Network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Josh Crane.
2-year-old: I want to wear my special vest.
Josh Crane: Your special vest?
2-year-old: Yeah.
Josh Crane: It’s the first Saturday in May. My dog, my 2-year-old and I all don our reflective vests and join tens of thousands of other volunteers picking up roadside litter all around the state. It’s Vermont’s 56th annual Green Up Day.
Josh Crane: Keep your eyes open for trash.
2-year-old: I see some.
Josh Crane: You see some?
2-year-old: Yeah.
Josh Crane: Where?
2-year-old: There. They’re right there.
Josh Crane: Spring in Vermont means the arrival of birds and buds — and also the emergence of the trash that’s been buried underneath the snow all winter long. This was such a big problem in the 1960s that the state created an annual event to address it. 70,000 people participated in the first Green Up Day in 1970. They even shut down the highways for safer litter collection.
But in the wake of all the enthusiasm, the state realized something: Nearly all the litter picked up that day was beer cans and beer bottles.
So Vermont joined a bunch of other states and passed something called a “bottle bill”. The bill created a system for returning disposable bottles and cans instead of, you know, trashing them. And it was built around a five-cent bounty on those bottles and cans. The idea was, people would think twice about chucking them out their car windows if they could exchange them for money. And for those that still get chucked, the bill would incentivize other people to scoop ‘em up and cash in.
And, it worked! The bottle bill led to way less litter. And, of course, Green Up Day has become something of a Vermont holiday for those who choose to partake.
2-year-old: Sing the trash song.
Josh Crane: The trash song?
2-year-old: Yeah
Josh Crane: How does the trash song go?
2-year-old: Sing it!
Josh Crane: I don’t know how it goes! (Starts to sing)
Josh Crane: I’ll spare you my singing. And I know, I know: This might seem like a feel-good story about Vermonters and lawmakers banding together to clean up the state. But our story today is a little different, because now, more than 50 years after the bottle bill was passed, the redemption system it created is on the verge of imploding.
To answer a question from a listener, Brave Little State’s Burgess Brown dug into the drama and spent time with the people who are doing everything they can to try and hold this system together. All that when we come back.
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Welcome to Valley
Burgess Brown: OK, hi.
Kevin Donohue: Hello.
Burgess Brown: Can you introduce yourself and tell me where we are?
Kevin Donohue: Sure. I’m Kevin Donohue. I'm a Thetford resident, but right now I'm two towns north in Bradford, Vermont, with a beautiful view of some of the White Mountains.
Burgess Brown: I’m chatting with question-asker Kevin Donohue in Bradford, on the Vermont side of the Upper Valley. He wants to know, “Who redeems bottles and cans in Vermont? Why are there so few places to do so?”
Kevin grew up on Long Island in New York. He remembers going to the local superstore as a kid to return bottles with his family for five cents a pop. He’s been in this area for eight years, but only discovered last year that Vermont also has a bottle redemption program like his home state.
Kevin Donohue: So I gathered up, started to collect my cans. And I came to Valley Redemption, which is not a bible church in Bradford, in fact — a redemption, a bottle redemption center. And I entered in this subterranean place. and Sweet T was there.
The way that she sorts bottles. I was mystified!
Burgess Brown: This is really what’s behind Kevin’s question. He wants us to meet Sweet T.
She left a real impression. That day at the redemption center, Kevin dumped all his cans out in front of her.
Kevin Donohue: And then she started flying. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then she'll throw, boom, she'll throw, boom. And I was like, in awe. And we started talking. She asked me which one was my favorite, we had a very nice conversation and then at the end, she goes, “Okay, that'll be $10, $10.60.” I go, whoa!
Burgess Brown: Sweet T sorted Kevin’s cans at a blistering pace and tallied his total in her head as she went, all while holding a conversation with him. He couldn’t believe it.
Kevin Donohue: So, she's not like estimating. It was a very specific number. So she must have an exact count. But I didn't see any sensors. I was in awe.
Burgess Brown: Then, Sweet T said to him, “I’m taking a smoke break, want to join me?”
Kevin Donohue: We had our little chat together, and I was on my merry way. And I said, “Well, that was an incredible experience.” And just goes to show how fun bottle redemption is, I think. So that's what kept me coming back.
Burgess Brown: Ever since then, Kevin’s made the 20-minute drive to drop his bottles off with Sweet T every few weeks. He’s done the math and the cost of gas usually outweighs the money he gets back. But he says the experience is worth it.
So now, Kevin and I are here at Valley Redemption together. We want to get a better sense of how this system works and the ways it doesn’t. But mostly, the chance to hang out in a sprawling basement warehouse with Sweet T seemed too good to pass up.
Sweet T: Well come on in. It's a little bit of a mess. But we’re cleaning up. Welcome to Valley!
Burgess Brown: Wow.
Sweet T: Yeah, lots of space.
Burgess Brown: This is Teera Paye. But everyone calls her Sweet T. Sometimes just T.
Sweet T: I'm the boss lady, I guess, manager, whatever you want to call it. I'm just Sweet T. I'm just a person.
Burgess Brown: Sweet T grew up in Newbury and then moved to Bradford 15 years ago. She was working at a bakery in town when a friend of hers said he could use some help with his bottle redemption gig. So she dove in.
Sweet T: He left. I stayed on, and just kind of fell in love with it.
Burgess Brown: Do you like your job?
Sweet T: Oh, yeah, I couldn't do anything else. I'm really good at it too.
Burgess Brown: What makes you good at it?
Sweet T: I'm fast, I'm fun. I make the customers feel welcome, and most of the time. I treat them to good stuff, either a hug, a joke, sympathy ear, food.
Burgess Brown: Teera became Sweet T in high school. She says she was sort of an oddball and used to resent it. But then she changed her tune.
Sweet T: I stopped being so angry with everybody, and my name was hard to pronounce, so everybody just called me “T,” and then it became Sweet T. And over the years, it’s just — I'd rather be sweet instead of angry. And when you're nice, you get to see people smile.
Burgess Brown: She wears her brown hair in a high, messy bun. It’s practical for flinging cans all day. She just turned 34. Yesterday, in fact. She spent the day here.
Sweet T: Yesterday was freaking fantastic. I made people laugh, cry, smile. Got all my shopping done, got home and I sat down, kicked off my boots, had a cigarette and I’m like, “Yep this is a birthday that actually made the list.”
And I did the strawberry shortcakes here for my customers and me. We're gonna have those later.
Burgess Brown: She’s saved some leftovers for Kevin and me.
Sweet T’s been working at Valley Redemption for seven years. She calls it her home away from home.
Sweet T: I mean, I've got a little kitchen. I've got people's artwork up on the wall. I'm here 40-plus hours a week, so why not?
Burgess Brown: Dreamy.
Sweet T: I mean, yes, it's a little messy, and this smell does get a little raunchy during the summer. But—
Burgess Brown: I mean …
Sweet T: Yeah, slap a couple hammocks in between the beams and you’re freaking hanging out.
Burgess Brown: (Laughter) Paradise.
Burgess Brown: This paradise can look a bit like a dungeon at first glance. There are dark rooms within dark rooms, some of them filled to the ceiling with bags of bottles and cans.
But, as T says, there are touches of home. Like a sign reminding customers of the, QUOTE, “Family Rules” (“Keep your promises. Use kind words”). Or Sweet T’s “Wall of Labels” — hundreds of colorful beverage labels pasted onto giant banners that hang on the wall. She’s been working on it for years.
Sweet T: This isn't even all of them yet. I still have another barrel to go through.
Burgess Brown: T holds down the fort almost entirely on her own. She's training a high school student who works part time on weekends, to save up money for a new car. Valley Redemption says they can’t afford another full-time employee right now. That leaves T to field a hectic stream of redeemables that need to be counted and sorted all day long.
Burgess Brown: I'm just trying to make sense of the flow here.
Burgess Brown: Sweet T’s standing behind a long counter at the front of this redemption cavern. She has these black bins where customers empty their cans into a heaping pile. She sorts those cans into six commercial trash bins. These are for the most common types of containers.
Sweet T: You've got your Pepsi, your Coke, your White Claws, Stella Artois, Mountain Dews …
Burgess Brown: There are smaller bins for less common brands and then further back a big round metal, like, lazy susan-type thing, where even less common cans go for further sorting.
Sweet T: So we also got, like, your Zevia and Adirondack, your Price Chopper, Spindrift. You got your Nestle’s, which is the Perrier …
Burgess Brown: Sweet T is grabbing containers four at a time, clocking their brand and size, hurling them into the appropriate bin and tallying the price in her head — all while chatting with customers about their families or the weather.
Sweet T: It's a big algebraic equation, if you think about it, so many cans times .05. So I just count them as they are, ring it up. Usually, I can figure it out before I hit the register.
Burgess Brown: And she’s really fast. T says she’s always been good at math and multitasking.
Sweet T: I was taught cribbage at a very young age. Yes, that definitely helped.
Burgess Brown: This isn’t just for show, by the way. It keeps the line of customers from spiraling out of control. People may show up with a small bag of bottles to redeem, or a truck bed full of a winter’s worth of cans. T handles it all.
She’s on her feet all morning. Tossing cans, dumping glass, bagging bottles. It’s non-stop. With whatever gap she’s got between customers, T is miraculously making us all lunch. She’s got a little hot plate in the middle of the warehouse.
Burgess Brown: OK talk to me. What are we doing?
Sweet T: I'm gonna chop up some peppers. I'm gonna thinly slice some radishes and chop up some onions, throw them in the pan with some of the shredded steak, and once I get just about done, I'll kind of fold in the cheese. And then we're gonna have some steak bombs.
Burgess Brown: Oh my god. Do you get tired?
Sweet T: Working here? Oh, at the end of the day, yeah, I'm pretty worn out, but I don't let it affect my mood.
Burgess Brown: How do you do that? How do you not let it affect your mood?
Sweet T: You're talking to Sweet T here, come on. Even during the winter when I got to go home and lug in wood. It's just another thing that has to be done.
Burgess Brown: She takes pride in making her customers happy, and doing her job really well. But all those hours in a dark warehouse counting and lugging aluminum and glass — they add up. She’s usually on her own and the pay’s not great. And she says she doesn’t always feel as chipper as she seems.
Sweet T: I try not to let other people see. Why bring them down if I’m down? It's not the way I want people to see me. I'm not always strong. I'm not always held together. There are points where the stress builds up so much I actually break, but it hasn't happened in a while, thank God.
Burgess Brown: It takes a certain kind of person to do a job like this, and to do it well for so long. Sweet T’s on year seven. and going strong.
But the system she’s working in is falling apart.
More after the break.
_
‘Holding on by a thread’
Burgess Brown: Sweet T’s job at the bottle redemption center exists because of the bottle bill Vermont passed way back in 1972. And now, 50 years on, the redemption system isn’t doing so well.
Jacob Trombley: It's literally holding on by a thread.
Burgess Brown: This is Jacob Trombley. He owns four redemption centers around the state — including Valley Redemption, where Sweet T works. Redemption is in his blood. His dad ran a center in Vergennes for 30 years.
He says it’s a tough business. And it’s only gotten tougher since his dad’s time.
Jacob Trombley: We're not thriving. We're surviving. I mean, since I’ve bought these places, I’ve cut staffing, I’ve cut — I mean, I’ve cut everything I can. Pretty much every place has a skeleton crew in it. Like, I’m getting to the point where I can’t cut anything else. I’m looking at cutting the phone.
Burgess Brown: Redemption centers make their money through what's called a "handling fee." Basically, they collect containers from customers. They sort them and package them, and the beverage manufacturers have them picked up for recycling. When they do that, those companies pay the redemption center an extra 3.5 to 4 cents per container for all the overhead and the labor it took to do the collecting and sorting.
So that’s the margin. Three and half to four cents a container. Only a few cents higher than the price set in 1972, under the original bottle bill. All the while, the costs of doing business are going up.
Jacob Trombley: I'm not saying that we need a lot, but we need a raise.
Burgess Brown: Jacob says he can’t hire enough people because the margins in redemption are just too slim.
Jacob Trombley: It's a meat grinder of a job at this point, you know. Now, I hire someone, they get bombarded all day long. Like, they have to fight to go to the bathroom, they have to fight to do anything, because people just keep coming and pushing them, pushing them and pushing them. It's one person stuck here in a dungeon, and there's a line of people, and it just keeps coming.
Burgess Brown: Around the state, most redemption sites today are a piece of a larger businesses — so, connected to a liquor store, a grocer or a general store. Some stores even have these redemption machines, which are sort of like reverse vending machines for bottles and cans.
And technically, all retailers are required to accept bottle returns for brands that they sell, but because that work isn’t typically profitable, lots of places just don’t do it at all.
Becky Webber: The reality is it's not enforceable and it's not efficient.
Burgess Brown: Becky Webber is with Vermont’s solid waste program — they administer the bottle bill. She says that because we can’t count on many stores for redemption, privately-run redemption centers, like Valley Redemption, have become even more crucial. But if redemption centers can’t turn a profit, the whole system collapses.
Becky Webber: If it's not a viable private business, there goes our network. If retailers aren't doing it and redemption centers aren't choosing to be redemption centers, then we don't have a network.
Burgess Brown: Becky says her department doesn’t track exact numbers of redemption centers over time. But she estimates that number has dropped by around a third over the last few decades.
So it seems like someone should do something, huh? Well, that has proven easier said than done.
Becky Webber: It's very controversial. People love the bottle bill or they hate it, like, honestly, I get calls saying, “It should be 25 cents a container,” and “This should not be happening, what is going on? Why do we have this?” every day.
Burgess Brown: Now we could do a whole series just on the drama surrounding the bottle bill. But to quickly sum up:
Beverage industry giants, like Coca-Cola, have opposed the bottle bill from the start. It puts the onus on those companies to fund the recycling of their own products, rather than passing that cost on to municipalities.
And then there are single stream recyclers — the biggest in this region being Casella. Redemption diverts volume from their system, which cuts into their profits. They argue that having two systems is redundant.
So attempts to modernize the bottle bill — say, by making more containers redeemable — have faced steep opposition at the Statehouse. A few years back its proponents got really close. A bill passed — and then Gov. Scott vetoed it.
But the fight continues. Every legislative session sort of feels like it could be the session where something finally changes.
A question that I kept asking myself while doing this reporting was: Why fight for this system at all? I mean, recycling is a lot more common now than it was at the dawn of the bottle bill in the ‘70s. What would happen if we just got rid of the deposit and chucked everything in the blue recycling bins?
Becky says, from an environmental standpoint, there are benefits to the redemption system over recycling.
Becky Webber: There is, even in Vermont, some difference in where the bottle bill materials go and where the recycling materials go, especially for glass.
Burgess Brown: Because bottles and cans must be cleaned to be accepted for redemption, they are more likely to be recycled into, say, another bottle. Bottles recycled curbside are more likely to be contaminated and sent to the landfill.
Another reason in favor of the bottle bill system goes back to the bill’s original purpose: Giving people financial incentive NOT to litter, and also to pick up other people’s litter.
And, Becky says, people love their redemption centers.
Becky Webber: Redemption centers are not, you know, they're not, maybe the center of social and cultural life. But you go with the same time every week, you see the same people. You know, it's, it's not something that you just throw away.
‘The best person in the entire world’
Sweet T: Hello dear, how's the baby?
Burgess Brown: Back at Valley Redemption, the stream of customers just keeps coming. Many of them are regulars.
Brian Duff: Ever since I was little, started learning how to drive, that’s my gas money. It was my gas money when I was 16.
Burgess Brown: Brian Duff has been redeeming at Valley for years. Now it’s a weekend activity with his little daughter.
Brian Duff: She takes them outside, throws them in the bin for me. And we put them in the bag, and we take them …
Burgess Brown: People I talk to have lots of reasons they take the extra time and effort to wait in line on a Saturday. Some do it for environmental reasons. And, while five cents isn’t what it was in the ‘70s, Martha Hodge says it adds up.
Martha Hodge: Just saving for Christmas or something. Lots of grandchildren.
Jodi Lenning: Well, I started this to help my students understand the importance of redeeming bottles.
Burgess Brown: Jodi Lenning is a local middle school teacher. She encourages her students to collect bottles for the good of the environment … and to fund a pizza party.
Jodi Lenning: Last year we had more of an ice cream social at the end of the year and this year I think I’ll probably be able to get the pizzas.
Burgess Brown: Some people donate the money they get back to local causes — the Scouts or a church fundraiser. When I was at Valley Redemption, there were piles of cans set aside for a school trip to Greece and kids saving for a dirt bike race. Sweet T has seen it all.
Sweet T: It's amazing what people save up for over the years. I had one guy, he was saving up for a boat. He wanted to sail around the world with his wife, and about two years after he started saving, they found out that they were having a little one. So he decided to take that money and put it toward his daughter.
Burgess Brown: Our question-asker Kevin told me he likes to redeem because it’s good for the environment, and a little cash for ice cream never hurts. But mostly he makes the 20 minute drive to Valley Redemption to see Sweet T. He’s not alone.
Dick Hendrick: She's just fantastic. She's like, always cheerful, always helpful. She's great.
Burgess Brown: Dick Hendrick. He’s been redeeming his containers here for 30 years.
Dick Hendrick: I mean, who looks forward to bringing their cans back anywhere?
Lynn Rider: This is the best person in the entire world.
Burgess Brown: And this is Lynn Rider.
Lynn Rider: If there were an Olympics recycling, she would be on the team and America would win every year. So, I think we're really lucky to have a way to get rid of, you know, to get this stuff reused. But to have someone who's always kind and brilliant. I mean, nobody is this brilliant at at this.
Sweet T: That’s it?
Lynn Rider: That’s it, yep.
Burgess Brown: T’s still flying around the warehouse. Counting and bagging and stacking. She chats with customers about their favorite seasons, she talks to me about my favorite foods. At one point we talk about our fears.
All the while, she tallies the bottles and cans up in her head, never missing a beat.
Sweet T: Thank you, darling. Have a great day. Gorgeous out today.
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