What Does CRV Mean and How Does It Work?

CA Redemption Value

I’ve gotten a couple questions lately related to “CRV”.

First from Lisa, a reader here at It’s Frugal Being Green:

Can you tell me what CRV stands for?

Second from one of my out of state cousins:

What does it actually mean when a bottle says “cash refund”? How does it work?

So here’s a run down on everything you might ever want to know about CRVs.

CRV stands for California Redemption Value or California Refund Value. The acronym is used for both and the two are related.

California Redemption Value is a deposit Californians pay when purchasing bottled water, soft drinks, sports drinks, coffee, tea, beer, or other malt beverages packaged in aluminum, plastic, or glass. Cash registers are programmed to ring up the deposit separately from the cost of the beverage and it appears as a separate line item on your receipt. Discounts usually do not apply to CRV in the same way they don’t apply to sales tax, however, I have discovered that CVS coupons like $3 off a $15 purchase do count the CRV in the total purchase amount.

California Refund Value is the amount recycling centers pay back to Californians when they recycle those containers. The California Refund Value is printed on the beverage package.

My cousin wanted to know how exactly this works. Do we look at each bottle and add up all the numbers? No. The values are based on the weight of the packaging material so we just sort out our recyclables by type (aluminum cans, #1 plastic, or glass) and the recycling center weighs our recyclables and gives us the cash back.

To get your cash refund you must take your recyclables out to a recycling center. I’d be getting back less than $1 a week so I don’t find it worth my while to make that extra trip or spend my time sorting my containers. Instead I put all my recyclables in my curbside recycling cart and have them collected on garbage day. In this case, my city (which operates the recycling center those recyclables end up at) claims my deposit and keeps it.

Are there any other questions about CRV?

Photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/spine/ / CC BY 2.0