Janie Scheuermann has limited her hours at J&K Redemption Center, but isn’t letting a pandemic stop her from counting cans. HERALD FILE PHOTO

Cans likely stacking up

Redemption center open, but few people coming in

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Sheer genius.

Of all the products Fareway could stick on an empty shelf, cases of beer now occupy a spot in Jefferson once packed before COVID-19 with toilet paper and other paper products.

Each bottle and can carries with it a nickel deposit — a state law since 1979 — which consumers return to a redemption center like J&K Redemption Center on Lincoln Way for a refund.

But area residents are apparently hanging onto their empty cans and bottles during the pandemic, leaving J&K owners Janie and Kent Scheuermann to endure yet another bump in an already unstable industry.

Business has gotten so slow in Jefferson — the Scheuermanns also own the redemption center in Perry — that limited hours were implemented recently.

A Des Moines company that collects empty containers on behalf of the beer companies had been coming to Jefferson three days a week to collect empties. Now it’s down to once a week.

Not long ago, between Jefferson and Perry, the Scheuermanns were filling three semi trailers a week with empty beer cans.

Redemption centers in Iowa were already up against the ropes — many decided to throw in the towel instead of continuing to work for a penny a can — but now a decline in volume has closed even more, according to Kent Scheuermann.

Business at their Perry location has almost returned to normal simply because they’re close enough to Des Moines and are one of the few redemption centers still open. Also, Gov. Kim Reynolds suspended parts of the bottle bill — the provision requiring stores to accept an empty beverage container on which a deposit was made — as part of her state public health emergency declaration.

Kent Scheuermann said he’s been fielding more than a dozen calls a day asking if they’re open.

“It’s a bad way to get free advertisement,” he confessed.

The governor’s order confused some people, he said, leading to a misconception that redemption centers are closed.

However, he’s not a retailer.

In Jefferson, both grocery stores long ago signed over their legal obligation to accept empty cans and bottles to J&K. The Scheuermanns have offered to relieve local convenience stores of that same obligation, to varying responses.

But even in hard-hit New York, the state that leads the country in deaths from COVID-19 — nearly 11,000 deaths — redemption centers have been deemed essential services.

For some, scouring ditches for cans has literally become a lifeline.

“People are out of work and they need the money,” Janie Scheuermann said of an uptick in people bringing in ditch cans.

Redemption center operators like the Scheuermanns have long advocated for a modernization of Iowa’s bottle bill that would give them a penny raise. Short of a raise, they’ve had to rely on sheer volume to get by.

Before the pandemic, Kent Scheuermann spent most of his time on the road, picking up cans and bottles from bars, gas stations and grocery stores in a massive sweep of central Iowa.

With bars closed, all of those routes are now down, he said, putting a 40 percent kink in his business. And he worries that many of the nearly three dozen bars he services won’t survive the state-ordered closure.

But even before the coronavirus made cleanliness the new national pastime, redemption center work was notoriously dirty.

Fewer than 1 percent of people, they said, wash out their empties.

Bags of empty cans and bottles frequently contain unsanitary surprises, from needles and diapers to snakes and mice and even crack pipes and sex toys.

“If it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go,” Janie Scheuermann said.

She counts all empties by hand, and only recently started wearing gloves every so often — but not for the obvious reason.

“I’m tired of people asking me,” she said.

There’s a “very low risk” of spreading the novel coronavirus via packaging, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It may be possible to get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object with the virus on it, then touching your mouth, nose or possibly eyes, but the virus is spread primarily from person to person through respiratory droplets.

There’s also no evidence to support transmission of the virus through food, according to the CDC.

Even still, the majority of customers at J&K during the pandemic, Janie Scheuermann observed, have been people 65 and older.

She felt like one customer was pushing his luck by being out — he’d already had pneumonia twice.

“Dude,” she thought, “you need to stay home.”

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Jefferson, IA 50129

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