Tomra Of North America

Tomra opened its San Francisco center 3 years ago right by a BevMo on South Bayshore ave. It has automatic «reverse vending» machines so you can just slide your bottles and get full CRV credit (a full 5cents per bottle!) for your haul. Unfortunately the machine doesn’t recognize all bottles so you’ll still have to deal with the sorter which is a big metal slide for recyclables. You can also recycle by weight and it does the usual liquid down adjustment that I heard is common in the industry (that way you don’t get the extra weight that comes from not completely empty bottle). It’s super loud here and the other customers are mainly local independent contractors aka the people who roam the streets of the city gathering bottles and cans. The workers are generally helpful but the pricing structure is not very transparent. The rates per each class of recyclables are posted clearly but the workers just scrawls some numbers on a slip of paper and that gets converted to money at the register so you don’t know if you are getting the CRV all dry weight vs the regular plastic rate. This place is also the only retail establishment that gives out 2 dollar bills and 50cent coins. Overall not a bad place to bring all your bottles.