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Back in 2006, I think, I didn't have a part-time job, and was binning full-time; collecting beverage containers and returning them to collect the deposit. There were (and are) a few kinds of containers with returnable value which weren't standard beer, pop, juice, or water. One was a white plastic milk jug, labelled as sold by Wild Birds Unlimited -- the green screw-cap had a sticker declaring it had a 25-cents return value. This was a nickel more than its volume would make it worth if it was, say, a juice container. I would occasionally see these jugs in recycling bins and boxes, and had returned a few -- there was only one Wild Birds Unlimited store that I knew of, and it was in my area.

One summer evening, I was binning in the area of that store, and went down the alley behind it. There were two large city-issued grey garbage toter bins beside the back door. I stopped. Opened the lid of one bin, then the other, just to see. They both seemed to be full of a lot of these Wild Birds Unlimited plastic jugs.

Uhhhh?  I bundled them all up in two garbage bags, and secreted them across the street in some bushes.

The next day, I carried the two bags through the front door of the store, the owner looked in both bags and told me, because I had gone to so much trouble to collect them and bring them in, he would pay me the deposit, but normally he wouldn't take them with even the slightest dent. He explained that they needed to be flawless because they would get sterilized and be filled up again with bird seed and sold. He wouldn't pay for the flawed ones, just take and throw them away (in the grey bins out back).

I wasn't saying a word by this point, maybe not even breathing. But I'm sure I thanked him when he handed me the deposit money. And I never went back. They are now located on West Broadway.