Another tip to make your Depot experience better is to empty and rinse your containers before storing them at home, leave the lids off so they can dry.
This means you will have less odour and less chance of flies and wasps to deal with.
The Alberta Bottle Depot Association (ABDA) plays an integral role in Alberta's (Canada) waste management efforts. ABDA is the recognized voice for Alberta's bottle depots, an industry that collected over 1,800,000,000 beverage containers last year, and it is also active in expanding the role of the depots as "Eco-Centres" within the province as well as developing technology to advance the efficiency of the system.
The bottle depots of Alberta are a network of 218 collection sites that redeem deposits paid by consumers for their beverage containers at point of sale. More than 90% of the public surveyed note using bottle depots, and return rates for most containers are above 80%. The network is in almost every community in Alberta and is serviced regularly by a common collection system managed by the Beverage Container Management Board (BCMB).
More than 1,000,000 litres of used oil are collected through participating Eco-Centres now located at more than 50 bottle depots around the province. A single litre of oil can contaminate 10,000 litres of potable water. By educating consumers to bring their used oil, oil containers and oil filters to their local bottle depot, along with their bottles and cans, it is hoped that Alberta's water reserves, landfills and ecosystems can be protected.
ABDA has also developed automated counting technology to assist depots in moving high volumes of containers through their operations efficiently and is currently developing densification technology that will reduce the amount of transportation required to move empty beverage containers from depots to the recycling markets.
The goals and aims of the ABDA are to serve its members as a single unified voice and to align itself positively with the environment. To this end the ABDA is working to get other containers included in the system, to maintain deposit values that are relevant to our economy, and to expand into other similar areas that can see the network working positively an more efficiently to collect recyclable or environmentally dangerous materials (like used oil)..