Growing is Part of Our DNA: A Message from the CEO

“Too large a proportion of economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow ‘one’ to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world,” - John Maynard Keynes.

John Maynard Keynes was referring to economists who try to apply theoretical systems to the real world. He could just as easily have been referring to the CRV recycling system in California.

California’s original Bottle Bill legislation in 1986 was built on the assumption that consumers bought all beverages at traditional grocery stores. It naïvely anticipated that bottle deposit surpluses would provide a means to support a healthy ecosystem of recyclers collecting CRV materials from grocery store parking lots. The bottle bill presumed that stakeholders like recyclers, processors, and technology vendors would work harmoniously to keep the system operating efficiently.

In practice, consumers buy a significant portion of their CRV beverages from a wide spectrum of brick-and-mortar retailers, not to mention delivery services. The Cal Recycle reserve fund of surplus deposits has been raided by the state multiple times to plug holes in state budgets and handling fees fail to cover the expense of capturing material for the circular economy. Lastly, certain players in the recycling industry have fought to create walled gardens to defend their market share.

I’m pleased to report that a new option will enter the scene in 2025. In 2022, the legislature made a significant update to the Bottle Bill by allowing grocers and retailers to form a dealer cooperative to avoid in-store take back of CRV (SB 1013). The bill also added wine and spirits to the containers subject to CRV, meaning, problematic glass will be a more significant part of the commodity mix. This legislation provides the industry with a low-cost way to meet their state obligations while avoiding much of the nuisance and expense of handling containers with in-store take back.

In the coming months, the Circular CRV Association (CCA) will establish a platform to provide low-cost redemption using innovative collection technologies, with the costs shared by grocers, the State of California, and sponsors. The new dealer cooperative will offer cost savings to its members for a simple reason—sharing costs is more economical than carrying an expense as a stand-alone retailer. We will share details of CCA’s business model and membership options in the coming weeks.

Creating a new way to deal with CRV is just one way that RMS is growing to meet the needs of grocers and retailers. Thirty years after its creation by the California Grocers Association, our company is expanding significantly to meet the needs of retailers in our shopping cart business.

Our carTrac business is growing as fast as we can build infrastructure. Our cart maintenance division has grown by 296% over the past year, while new cart sales are up by 146%, and cart retrieval services have expanded by over 15%. Our steep growth can be credited to the fact that our services help grocers and retail customers save money while providing excellent service. The high demand for our shopping cart services is due to our ability to solve widespread problems over a large geographic area while maintaining a culture of excellence and continuous improvement.

We are also exploring the use of GPS and AI technologies to reduce shopping cart loss, recruiting cart repair technicians to become subject-matter experts, and utilizing global supply chains to offer new shopping carts at competitive prices.

RMS also has a secret weapon. In each of our divisions, we utilize a model that has existed for hundreds of years, from the masons who built the great European cathedrals, to the guilds and associations of Nordic and Dutch craftsmen, and up to the present in certain professions.

We actively grow our workforce with apprenticeships and years of training for our technicians. We pair new hires with an experienced mentor to help them learn the complex skills they need to help us provide the best quality of services for our customer base. Much of our retail service industry uses a low-value churn of employees in an endless hamster wheel effort without a virtuous growth path. We are in the business for the long haul. In fact, with all the chaos of COVID-19 and its aftermath, less than 5 percent of RMS employees voluntarily leave our company each year.

RMS has much to do as the grocery and retail industries change, but our commitment to excellence and continuity will remain constant.