Bottle Redemption Bottleneck

When the Bottle Redemption Center opened in Eugene, I was glad to see a place I could get to easily by bike and deposit cans and bottles without a fuss at the grocery store. Not anymore.

Now there is always a long line of people with huge bags of returnables entering an understaffed, overworked, loud, filthy building too small to accommodate the high demand. The last time I went in the middle of the day, midweek, one man took a look at the wait and offered his large bag to someone behind me because he didn’t want to deal with it. I don’t blame him. Half an hour later I got $1.90 for my effort. No wonder people put it off for weeks.

No one likes this arrangement. Better signage and education on how to properly use the facility and more staff (and adding more parking for patrons with bicycles) would mitigate the current situation, but having only one center in a town of 170,000 was a gross misjudgment by OLCC. We desperately need more locations to encourage proper recycling because the system we have now makes it unpleasant, inconvenient and time consuming for everyone.

Alisa McLaughlin

Eugene