AUGUSTA (AP) -A state crackdown on schemes to cash in on Maine’s returnable container law has resulted in a $10,000 fine against the owner of Thirsty Dawg II redemption centers in South Berwick and Kittery.
State agriculture officials recently trailed truckloads of bottles and cans from New Hampshire, where no container deposit is collected, to a center owned by Cameron N. Paine. In a settlement approved in Kennebec County Superior Court, Paine agreed to refrain from forwarding empty beverage containers not originally sold in Maine.
He also agreed to collect identifying information on people delivering more than 300 empty beverage containers and to post a notice at his businesses listing penalties for attempting to redeem containers not originally purchased in Maine.
Paine, who declined to comment on the case, was assessed the statutory minimum penalty of $25,000, with all but $10,000 suspended. Under Maine law, containers are redeemed for at least a nickel apiece; the beverage distributor also pays the redemption center a three-cent handling fee on each bottle or can.
The complaint accused Paine of violating Maine’s Unfair Trade Practices Act and the Maine Beverage Container Laws.
Fraudulent redemptions are a problem, said Elizabeth Milligan, controller at Returnable Services in Augusta, which receives most redeemed noncarbonated beverage containers in the state. It then transports them to sites where they are destroyed and recycled.
Oakley Jones, general manager for Coca-Cola bottling in Maine, said illegally redeemed containers are costly to distributors. “There’s no question that we’re paying out money on containers from out of state, and there was never any money paid in, no sales tax, no deposit,” he said. “It’s just a drain.”
Nationally marketed bottles carry the Maine deposit stamp because it’s not cost-effective to change labeling for a market of 1 million people, Jones said.
The state says Paine’s business “received a large delivery of sorted and bagged empty noncarbonated beverage containers from a 1988 white Chevy van towing a black trailer with New Hampshire plates” on May 31, 2002.
The van was driven by a New Hampshire resident employed by Paine. The lawsuit claims Paine knew most of the 10,396 noncarbonated beverage containers were not originally sold in Maine.
Similar deliveries to Paine’s businesses were witnessed by agriculture officials on July 30, 2002, and again Oct. 28, 2002. For a shipment of more than 10,000 containers, Paine would have received more than $800.
“We happened to be in the right place at the right time,” said Hal Prince, inspection program manager with the Division of Quality Assurance and Regulation in the state Department of Agriculture.
AP-ES-05-05-03 1058EDT
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