The Cube you used has stopped accepting CRV containers. It is one of many recycling locations that have closed across California. Since 2013, the state has lost more than half of its Certified Recycling Centers. The outdated rules governing where redemption can occur and how it is funded are a major reason why.
Those rules were written for a different era. They can be modernized. The sections below explain what is broken, and how the Legislature can fix it.
What you can do: contact your California Assemblymember and State Senator and ask them to support updated rules for reverse vending machines.
Show me how ↓Four steps, about five minutes. The policy detail is further down if you want it.
You have two representatives in Sacramento: one in the State Assembly and one in the State Senate. Message both and ask them to support updated rules for reverse vending machines. It takes about five minutes.
Enter your home address on the Legislature's official lookup tool. It returns your State Assemblymember and your State Senator, each with a link to their website.
Find my legislators ↗On each legislator's website, look for Contact in the top menu. Most offices use a web form that asks for your name, address and message. Your address matters, because offices prioritize their own constituents.
Say which Cube you used and why it mattered to you. One personal sentence carries more weight than the rest of the message combined.
I am a constituent in [your city]. I want convenient places to recycle bottles and cans, and my neighborhood is losing them.
Please support updating California's recycling rules so reverse vending machines can operate where people actually shop and gather. That means a handling fee that covers real costs, more than one redemption option per neighborhood, and standards matched to what a machine can physically accept.
[Your name, city and ZIP]
Your Assemblymember and your State Senator are separate offices and do not share mail. Sending to one is half the job.
Reverse vending machines make redemption easier by bringing reliable, automated service to places people already visit. But today's regulatory framework was not designed around newer systems like Olyns, creating barriers to operating them at scale.
We believe California can protect consumers and the integrity of the CRV program while also making room for responsible innovation.
We continue to support our community and develop the Olyns platform as we work toward a path forward in California.
California's bottle bill dates to 1986 and was built around staffed recycling centers in supermarket parking lots. Automated machines are certified under those same rules.
California's recycling system is based around the concept of a Convenience Zone (CZ), which is a one-mile radius around a supermarket. Within these circles, Certified Recycling Centers (RCs) are authorized to redeem and return customer CRV.
CRV deposits can be returned to consumers only at RCs or at retailers in a zone. Outside a CZ, options are extremely limited for consumers to redeem their CRV.
This means the places Californians routinely empty beverage containers rarely support CRV redemption:
These places make ideal locations for reverse vending machines. But under current law, a machine sited there is not allowed to return CRV. A stadium or university can generate tens of thousands of beverage containers, yet unless they are within a Convenience Zone, consumers have little chance of redeeming their CRV.
The ask: stop tying CRV redemption to a one-mile supermarket radius. Support certified automated redemption wherever containers are actually consumed, and let venues, campuses, schools and public spaces host it.
To enable RCs to recover their costs of collection, labor, transport, rent, equipment and maintenance for redemption, the state provides a Handling Fee. That Handling Fee is available to only one RC in a Convenience Zone. If another RC moves into that CZ, then neither gets the fee.
What sense does this make? It means consumers have fewer opportunities to redeem their CRV and to recycle. Instead of encouraging more redemption options, the system discourages them.
This rule also assumes that everyone recycles the same way. In fact, the average Olyns Cube transaction was just 34 containers. A much smaller group returns hundreds or sometimes thousands of containers at once, and is better served by a staffed redemption center with scales, storage, and loading equipment. Both users trying to use the same RC, whether automated or not, is a prescription for frustration.
Those are different jobs requiring different facilities. Yet the current rules force a neighborhood to choose one or the other. Why not allow more recycling options within a Convenience Zone?
The ask: allow multiple certified recycling centers to operate within the same Convenience Zone and let them specialize. California needs more redemption options, not fewer.
As of July 1, 2025, California's Handling Fee is 1.289 cents per container. Every other deposit state that pays a handling fee pays more.
This is the reason there are fewer places to recycle. When the Handling Fee does not cover what it costs to take containers back, RCs close. More than 1,300 have closed since 2013, over half the statewide network. The Container Recycling Institute has told the state that the payment formulas never accounted for California's repeated minimum wage increases, and redemption rates have fallen alongside the closures.
Maine raised its fee twice in 2023, Iowa tripled its in the same year, and Vermont raised its effective July 1, 2026. Michigan and Oregon are excluded because they run producer-managed systems with no separate per-container handling fee.
Every other deposit state watched its redemption sites close and responded by paying more. California watched the same thing happen and pays the least. Nothing else in this state still costs 1986 prices.
The ask: set California's handling fee at a level that reflects what redemption actually costs today, and keep it current.
To qualify for the state handling fee, a Certified Recycling Center must accept every CRV-eligible beverage container. Since January 1, 2024, that includes wine and distilled spirits sold in bag-in-box, multi-layer pouches, and paperboard cartons, each carrying a 25 cent CRV. CalRecycle also requires a bag-in-box to be redeemed as a complete unit: the bladder, spout, and cardboard carton together. It is all or nothing: a center that cannot take one type on the list does not qualify for the payment on any of them.
A five-liter wine box cannot pass through a store-entrance intake as a complete unit, and neither can other oversized formats. Volume compounds it. Daily load limits let a single person present 100 pounds each of aluminum and plastic and 1,000 pounds of glass. A staffed lot with a forklift can absorb that. A kiosk at a store entrance cannot, and under the one-per-zone rule it is not allowed to leave that job to a site that can.
This is the harder problem. Nothing on a beverage container identifies where it was sold, so a can purchased in California is indistinguishable from the same can purchased in Nevada.
Even printed CRV markings are not definitive. California permanently exempted wine and spirits containers filled before January 1, 2025 from carrying CRV indicia. As a result, some eligible containers have no CRV marking, while some ineligible containers look identical to eligible ones. A person at a redemption center can ask questions. A machine cannot.
For small, automated reverse vending machines with limited capacity, even a handful of mistakes can erase any economic benefit from participating in the program.
In effect, California requires Certified Recycling Centers to accept every eligible container, including many that cannot be reliably identified or practically processed, while imposing substantial penalties for accepting the wrong ones. That is not a standard designed for automation. It is a standard designed for a staffed counter, applied to equipment with no counter and no staff.
The ask: certify automated machines for the container types they can physically accept and reliably verify, set eligibility standards a scanner can actually apply, and match penalty exposure to a standard that can be met.
That is why the rules need to change. Your legislators are the ones who can change them.
Show me how ↑The fund is not empty. The question is who receives it. California is unique among deposit states in allowing containers collected through curbside and drop-off programs to count toward its recycling rate while directing the CRV refund to the operators of those programs. When a bottle is placed in a household blue bin, the deposit does not return to the consumer who paid it. It follows the container to the hauler.
That is a policy choice, not a flaw. But every dollar directed to collection programs is a dollar not directed to consumer redemption, and the impact is evident in CalRecycle's own data.
Certified Recycling Centers pass the refund value back to consumers; curbside programs retain it. Both also receive processing payments. Yet locations where consumers can actually redeem CRV process about seven times more containers while receiving less than one fifth of the retained program funding.
The result is a system that underinvests in consumer redemption and misses its own target: 70 percent of eligible containers recycled in 2024, against a goal of 80.
The ask: fund places where people can actually redeem their CRV, not just where a supermarket happens to be within a mile.
Senate Bill 955, by Senator Catherine Blakespear of Encinitas, would change how supermarkets and reverse vending machines are treated under the program. As of July 2026 it had been amended and re-referred to Assembly Appropriations.
Part of it helps. The bill would confirm that a machine does not lose handling fee eligibility because another recycling center later certifies in the same zone, and that an existing center does not lose eligibility because a machine arrives. That is the coexistence the program needs.
Part of it goes the other way. As of August 3, 2026, the bill would also specify that a certified machine does not make an unserved convenience zone served, so a working, state-certified machine in your neighborhood would not count as redemption access. That discourages placing machines in exactly the communities with the fewest options today.
Tell your Assemblymember and State Senator what you want.
Show me how ↑No. These California service changes are tied to state certification requirements. Olyns continues to support and develop its platform.
Some Cubes remain in place while the state process is resolved. Keeping them in place allows service to resume if and when circumstances permit.
Visit CalRecycle's official directory to find a certified redemption location near you.
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