Most people hand over their bags of empties, pocket their cash, and walk out. Fair enough, that’s the whole point. But a lot of folks are curious: what actually happens after that? Where do the bottles go? Does the 5-cent deposit disappear into thin air, or does it go toward something real?
Here’s a plain, honest look at what goes on from the moment you walk into one of our 11 locations inside Beer Universe stores across Upstate New York, to the moment your empties leave the building for good.
Step 1: You Show Up With Your Empties
You pull into Beer Universe, grab your bags or boxes, and head to the Unlimited Redemption counter. No machine. No waiting for a clunky reverse vending unit to reject your cans one by one. Our team counts manually, which is faster, more accurate, and a lot less frustrating.
Before counting starts, your containers go through a quick check. We’re looking for three things:
- The NY 5¢ or NY 5 cents marking on the label, this confirms it qualifies under New York’s Returnable Container Act
- The container type, glass bottles, plastic bottles, and aluminum cans all qualify; anything unlabeled or out-of-state does not
- Basic condition, crushed cans are fine, but containers need to be identifiable
Step 2: The Count Happens Right in Front of You
This part is simple. Our staff sorts your empties by type, aluminum, glass, plastic, and counts them. You’re right there while it happens. No mystery, no “trust us” moment.
Once the count is done, you get paid on the spot. Five cents per eligible container, straight into your hand. If you brought in 200 cans, that’s $10. Bring in 500 bottles, that’s $25. It adds up faster than most people expect, especially if you’ve been stockpiling from a party, a bar, or just a busy few weeks at home.
There’s no waiting for a receipt to process, no voucher to redeem at a cashier. You get your money and you’re done.
Step 3: Sorting and Staging for Pickup
After you leave, your empties don’t just sit in a pile. They get sorted further, by material type and sometimes by brand or size, and staged for collection by distributors.
Here’s why that matters: in New York’s bottle deposit system, the beverage distributors, the companies that originally sold those drinks, are responsible for taking back the containers.
They pay the 5-cent deposit when the retailer buys the product. That deposit flows to the customer when they redeem. Then distributors reclaim the containers and get their deposit back from the state or the beverage manufacturer.
Sorting correctly speeds up that whole chain. An aluminum can needs to go back through a different path than a glass bottle, and both need to be separated from anything that didn’t qualify.
Step 4: Distributor Pickup and the Recycling Chain Begins
Distributors schedule regular pickups from our locations. When they collect the sorted containers, the material starts moving toward actual recycling, and this is where things get interesting depending on what you brought in.
Aluminum cans: These go to scrap metal dealers or recycling facilities where they’re shredded, melted down, and turned back into raw aluminum. New cans can be made from that recycled material in as little as 60 days, and the energy saved vs. producing virgin aluminum is significant. It takes a fraction of the energy to recycle aluminum compared to mining and refining it from scratch.
Glass bottles: Glass goes to processing facilities where it’s crushed into cullet, small fragments used to make new glass containers, fiberglass, or construction aggregate. Glass is 100% recyclable and can loop indefinitely without losing quality.
Plastic bottles: PET plastic (the most common type in beverage bottles) gets sorted, baled, and sent to plastic reclaimers. It ends up as recycled PET, used in new bottles, polyester fiber, packaging, and more.
Why a Dedicated Redemption Center Makes a Difference
A lot of people toss their eligible containers into the blue bin and assume that’s good enough. It’s not, at least not for the deposit money, and not always for the quality of recycling either.
When containers go through curbside recycling, they get mixed with everything else, paper, cardboard, other plastics. Contamination rates go up. Sorting is harder. The material quality that comes out the other end is lower.
When you bring your empties to Unlimited Redemption, they’re sorted clean, counted accurately, and handed off through a structured chain. The material that goes to recyclers from a redemption center is generally cleaner and more valuable than what comes out of mixed curbside bins.
Plus, you get paid. The blue bin does not pay you.
The Bigger Picture in Upstate New York
New York’s Returnable Container Act, the Bottle Bill has one of the highest container recovery rates in the country. States without a deposit system recover far fewer containers. The deposit creates a direct financial reason for people to return empties instead of tossing them.
Across our 11 locations, Albany, Coxsackie, Amsterdam, Kingston, Saugerties, Schenectady-Kelton, Schenectady-Union, Troy’s three spots, and Wynantskill. We process a significant volume of containers every week. Every one of those containers is money back in a customer’s pocket and material diverted from a landfill.
It’s not glamorous work. But it’s useful work, and the system only functions when people actually show up and redeem.
Can’t Make It In? We Do Pickups Too
If you’ve got a large volume after a party, a catered event, a bar cleanup, driving multiple trips worth of empties to a center isn’t always practical. We offer scheduled pickups for exactly that situation.
You schedule through our website, we come to you, count on-site, and settle up. Same process, same accuracy, just at your location instead of ours.
So, Where Do Your Bottles Go?
Short answer: they get counted, paid out, sorted, picked up by distributors, and funneled into actual recycling streams, aluminum back into cans, glass back into bottles, plastic back into material that gets used again.
The 5 cents you collect isn’t a throwaway amount either. A household that returns bottles consistently, say, a 6-pack or two a week, can pull in $50 to $100 over the course of a year just by not forgetting to redeem.
Bring your empties to any Unlimited Redemption counter inside Beer Universe, no machines, no hassle, instant cash. Find your nearest location at unlimitedredemption.com.
