Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In a state that loads up itself in protecting the environment, California’s recycling rates on beverage containers have dropped to their lowest point in a decade, resulting in cessation of recycling businesses. To augment the recycling rate of the beverage container, we believe that the number of recycling center should be increased as well as for practitioners to fathom what factors are affecting on the recyclers’ financial sustainability.

Through the Beverage Container Recycle Program(BCRP), the certified recyclers have two major sources to make a profit. One relies on the BCRF fund from the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle), and the other source is to sell recycled beverage containers to processors. Using the time series model, this paper examines whether various measures of the policy or market variables have a significant effect on keeping the recyclers’ financial sustainability in recent years. Furthermore, we would like to compare which source had been more associated with the sustainability of recyclers.

This paper characterizes policy variables into two types — California Redemption Value (CRV) and Local Assistance (public education, grant, incentive, etc). Also, this paper considers market variables as the price of aluminum, glass, and plastic. The recyclers’ sustainability data was collected from the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) and transformed into the number of existing recyclers.

We expect the result will show that the increase in the price of aluminum, glass, and plastic had a positive effect on the recyclers’ sustainability. On the other hand, the decrease on CRV and local assistance such as government grant, incentives had a negative effect on the recyclers’ sustainability. Also, we believe that the increase in minimum wage had a negative effect on the recyclers’ sustainability. Lastly, we anticipate the result will show that the decrease on the BCRF fund had more negative effect than the market values did.