BRIDGEPORT – Connecticut’s problem with cross-border fraud, in which people from New York, Massachusetts and beyond bring in their nickel-deposit empty cans and bottles to take advantage of the region’s only 10-cent redemption system, is not occurring at Fred Miers’s massive recycling operation on Boston Avenue here, he says.
Outside, in all weather, people wait in line for as long as two hours, then show photo identification to prove their residency. Eventually, they are directed to one of eight lanes where employees dump out the bags on steel tables and put the containers through digital counters. The cans and bottles then fall onto conveyors running to a back room, where dozens of workers sort them by hand. Plastic water bottles here, beer and soda cans there. Odd-shaped containers are put into their own clear plastic bags.
The sorting operation is fast-paced at Miers’ Simple Bottle Return. Back near the entrance, people line up at pay windows for their cash on the way out.
Farther back in the sprawling warehouse at the corner of Helen Street, 125 big bags of cans at a time get crushed into 800-pound squares of metal called bales, for sale as scrap in Miers’ longtime deals with beverage distributors. Bags of clear water bottles are put into box trucks. Glass is crushed and shipped by weight. People redeem about a million cans and bottles a day, in what might be the state’s largest deposit-container location, which redeems about 25% of the billions of empties returned in Connecticut annually…