[caption id="attachment_3421" align="alignnone" width="497"]
Westside Return-It Centre, open, but not for long. Image from Google Maps.[/caption]
NOTE: This article is outdated. See a more recent update on the Westside Return-It Centre.
The tiny little Westside bottle depot, improbably located nearly right in the high-rent heart of Kitsilano, on West Broadway Avenue, at Blenheim Street, is closing at the end of the month, not to return -- to that location at least -- according to Encorp Pacific, the industry stewardship group behind the Return-It program. Encorp's Westside Web page is now headlined:
Binners and a bottle depot owner have been telling me for two weeks now that Kitsilano's only bottle depot, the Westside Return-It Centre, would be closing; that the depot's owner wasn't able to get a new lease from the building's landlord. The question of when seems to have been answered. This will be welcome news for local area business, but bad news for binners in Kitsilano who have relied on this depot for years. Westside is truly a "store-front" bottle depot, with no parking of it's own. It's clientèle has pretty much always been walk-in local residents, and the "traditional" binners, whether homeless, and pushing a shopping cart, or riding a bike, or marginally housed in shelters, or Downtown Eastside Single Room Occupancy hotels.
The well-housed, and fed, car binners have never really taken their bottles to Westside. In fact, a lot of the so-called "traditional" binner-types, myself included, have avoided Westside unless we had no other choice; principally because they shave three cents off the ten cent deposit value of "domestic" beer bottles and beer cans. So where a dozen should earn a binner $1.20 CAN, Westside pays out only 90 cents, and hold back 30 cents. Many other Encorp depots do not give full deposit on domestic beer bottles, and beer cans -- Go Green pays eight cents each, or $1-a-dozen, but Westside also earned a bit of a reputation, among binners, for "sharp" accounting.
I will be impressed, and a bit amazed if the Westside's owner figures out a way to set up shop anywhere in Kitsilano, or farther West in Dunbar-Southlands -- it's all very pricey real estate -- residents in these upscale neighbourhoods look at binners much the same way Romans in ancient Italy looked at invading Visigoths. So, barring miracles, all the next-closest bottle depots, three of them: Go Green, United We Can, and Regional Recycling, will be deliberately bunched up in a so-called "recycling hub," or perhaps more accurately, a binner's ghetto, on the Western edge of East Vancouver.
Westside Return-It Centre, open, but not for long. Image from Google Maps.[/caption]NOTE: This article is outdated. See a more recent update on the Westside Return-It Centre.
The tiny little Westside bottle depot, improbably located nearly right in the high-rent heart of Kitsilano, on West Broadway Avenue, at Blenheim Street, is closing at the end of the month, not to return -- to that location at least -- according to Encorp Pacific, the industry stewardship group behind the Return-It program. Encorp's Westside Web page is now headlined:
Westside Return-It Centre **Temporary closure starting July 31, re-opening pending relocation.
Binners and a bottle depot owner have been telling me for two weeks now that Kitsilano's only bottle depot, the Westside Return-It Centre, would be closing; that the depot's owner wasn't able to get a new lease from the building's landlord. The question of when seems to have been answered. This will be welcome news for local area business, but bad news for binners in Kitsilano who have relied on this depot for years. Westside is truly a "store-front" bottle depot, with no parking of it's own. It's clientèle has pretty much always been walk-in local residents, and the "traditional" binners, whether homeless, and pushing a shopping cart, or riding a bike, or marginally housed in shelters, or Downtown Eastside Single Room Occupancy hotels.
The well-housed, and fed, car binners have never really taken their bottles to Westside. In fact, a lot of the so-called "traditional" binner-types, myself included, have avoided Westside unless we had no other choice; principally because they shave three cents off the ten cent deposit value of "domestic" beer bottles and beer cans. So where a dozen should earn a binner $1.20 CAN, Westside pays out only 90 cents, and hold back 30 cents. Many other Encorp depots do not give full deposit on domestic beer bottles, and beer cans -- Go Green pays eight cents each, or $1-a-dozen, but Westside also earned a bit of a reputation, among binners, for "sharp" accounting.
I will be impressed, and a bit amazed if the Westside's owner figures out a way to set up shop anywhere in Kitsilano, or farther West in Dunbar-Southlands -- it's all very pricey real estate -- residents in these upscale neighbourhoods look at binners much the same way Romans in ancient Italy looked at invading Visigoths. So, barring miracles, all the next-closest bottle depots, three of them: Go Green, United We Can, and Regional Recycling, will be deliberately bunched up in a so-called "recycling hub," or perhaps more accurately, a binner's ghetto, on the Western edge of East Vancouver.
Encorp bottle depots accept beer bottles on behalf of Brewers Distributor Ltd. (the industry stewardship group for beer). I'd thought -- and originally written -- that BDL paid the Encorp depots the full deposit on each beer bottle plus a small handling fee. I was wrong. Anthony, of the Encorp bottle depot Go Green, says BDL only pays Encorp depots the full deposit, and nothing more. So Encorp depots accept beer bottles as a courtesy, and convenience to their customers. Depots that don't pay full deposit on domestic beer are doing so to offset handling costs, and depots which do, are using it as a loss leader to attract customers to bring in all their containers, beer, and otherwise.
November 2013 - Still no new Kits depot but there are rumours ►
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