New CRV Buyback Station Opens in Southern Humboldt

Hambro Forest Products, a long-time player in the recycling industry, has opened a new CRV (California Redemption Value) buyback station in Southern Humboldt, located right behind Redway Tire. This development comes as a boon to the local folks who have been waiting for an opportunity to recycle and get their deposits back.Randy Scott, the General Manager at Hambro told KMUD’s Lauren Schmitt, “We are really excited about getting to Redway and providing the Redway recyclers a chance to recycle and get their money back.”The pandemic posed significant challenges for the recycling industry. Many facilities shut down. The Humboldt Waste Management Authority Board suspended CRV redemption, citing economic difficulties and declining scrap values. At one time there were no certified redemption centers in Humboldt County (or in nearby Trinity County for that matter.) As Assemblyman Jim Wood said in 2021, it had “become impossible and impractical for consumers to recover their California Refund Value (CRV) deposits.”

But Hambro managed to keep their Crescent City recycling center open. Scott told KMUD News,

When COVID hit, we actually closed for about six weeks, but then we felt like it was safe with masking and social distancing….We opened back up and we started getting folks from Humboldt County. So we thought, well, what better place to go next is Humboldt. We went to Arcata so. We’ve actually been in Arcata since April of 2022. We’ve been in Arcata and we opened up Fortuna this year in April. And also we’ve opened up Willow Creek so we’re… excited to get Redway on our maps.

Scott attributed their survival despite adverse market conditions to owning their own trucks “so we control the transportation.” He explained to KMUD, “We are a long ways away from the market. We market all of our material to Anderson California, which is still you know good drive from Arcata and Crescent City but, having our own trucks, we we control that. That’s what’s helped us stay in the market.”

He went on to say, “We are making a profit though not be real big, but we are making enough money to sustain our our operations and recycling side of things.”

Scott explained the process for folks to recycle:

If anybody has been to any of our other sites is going to be pretty much the same thing. We hope that people come with their materials sorted. And then we will inspect them make sure there’s no contamination, no glass mixed in with aluminum say.

We’ll inspect them and then we weigh and then we’ll give you cash for your for your CRV. So if you haven’t been to one of our centers, we’ll have people here that will kind of lay…the people out, show them what to do and help them. We…really believe in customer service. And I think our record shows that…we want to make it as easy and convenient and safe for the people to come and recycle.

We say clean, uncontaminated materials whole, but we take smashed cans we take smashed bottles, plastic bottles…We don’t like the caps well buy the caps but we don’t like them on the bottle. It creates problems when the when the bottle hits the baler those little caps become projectiles. That’s why we want them off…

So but they’re still get they still get their CRV value for them. But each person has a maximum limit to daily deliveries so 100 pounds of aluminum 100 pounds of plastic and 1000 pounds of glass per vehicle…But you can come tomorrow and bring that amount…We only buy back CRV beverage containers so it’s got to say California CRV, on the can/bottle. There’s different plastics, but they gotta say California CRV, we don’t take copper batteries, cardboard, stuff like that.

The new CRV buyback station is located at 3320 Redwood Drive, near Redway Elementary School. It is currently open two days a week–Wednesday and Thursday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Depending on community needs, Hambro may eventually expand its operational hours. For more information, visit HambroCRVbuyback.com.

UPDATE: Please note: According to manager Chris German, “3320 Redwood Drive is the actual address but we’ve been listing it as 477 Empire Drive due to the fact that the entrance is on Empire and when you google 3320 Redwood Dr. it puts you at the wrong place.”

Much thanks to Lauren Schmitt of KMUD News for allowing us to use her interview with Randy Scott.