The deposit is meant to incentive recycling

Unless there is a law that says you can only recycle goods in the state they were purchased in, this is just frivolous in my opinion. If any company did this (they do things like this all the time btw, it's literally the principle that drives outsourcing jobs/manufacturing/etc), it would be called good business sense. Rephrased my second portion which was overly cynical/came off as rude. As a Californian myself, if I really want to protect the environment, shouldn't we be taking outsourced materials that won't be recycled otherwise? As of 2021, we only recycled a little more than half of all bottles and cans, and we don't have enough recycling centers to service metro areas, Riverside and SB counties included. If the CRV really is a recycling incentive, and not a revenue generating tax (which it is - 90% of Californians don't get their CRVs back because they do in the recycling container they ALSO pay monthly for), and we have a surplus of the CRV, shouldn't we be okay with going above and beyond?

If you don’t pay the deposit, but try to claim it, that’s fraud.

So you want to start arresting all the homeless and underprivileged that spend 10-12 hours a day can diving to make ends meet? I personally do not have that level in my heart.

So according to you, a guy picks up a dollar off the street, tries to spend it, that's fraud?

Worked at a recycle depot once and paid out $200 for a bag of 5 hour energy drinks (RIP heart). The same bag of cans would have been around $10~$15.

I also became interested, this article includes sale price of alluminum for 2019, some implications of China's restrictions from 2018, and what the Ont. government was aledgedgly doing to undermine recycling.

No I get that, but if they're just scrapping the aluminum then they wouldn't be in trouble for scamming the CV tax. Only way 9 tons of aluminum or glass is worth 10 mil is with a whole mess of cv fraud, but 178 tons of scrap aluminum and glass for 7 and a half mil? Sounds about right. Something is very weird with these numbers.