Alleged Warehouse Thief Empties 30,000 Bottles Of Ice Tea, Collects $20 In Recycling Deposits


It was an apparent case of recycling gone wild.

An alleged thief apparently didn’t run the numbers before stealing 30,000 plastic bottles of ice tea and then spending half the night pouring them down the drain for their recycling value.

Due diligence? Perhaps reading the tea leaves would have been in order first to determine if the bottle, metaphorically speaking, was half full or half empty.

The ice tea bandit apparently nonetheless thought he could strike it rich by cashing in the bottle deposits, but the plan essentially went down the drain.

Before you jump to any conclusions, this incident did not happen in Florida. The scene of the crime was a tea warehouse in Wenzhou, China, in Zhejiang province.

When the beverage distributor showed up at his storage facility on the day in question, he realized that an entire pallet of ice tea bottles destined for a customer was missing. He called the cops. Investigators were originally stumped because the bottles never showed up on the local black market. They did, however, smell a very sweet odor outside the warehouse entrance.

Commented a police spokesman about the flawed or diluted, as it were, get-rich-quick scheme:

“After making further enquiries we discovered that a large number of iced tea bottles had been recycled with a local collector — and from there they were able to track down the man that… sold them. The collector remembered because usually the bottles are mixed when they come from private people, and these were all of the same type and not dirty as if they had never been in the bin.”

Upon being taken in custody by police, the suspect reportedly acknowledged that he noticed that the warehouse doors were unlocked when he was scouting the area for recyclable bottles late at night. “He had then called three friends, and together they had spent 12 hours unscrewing the bottles, and tipping the iced tea onto the ground outside the warehouse. They had then called a local plastic bottle collection firm to take the bottles away.”

The caper only netted the equivalent of about $20 for the entire stash of empty bottles. The retail value of the filled plastic ice tea bottles collectively was about $34,000 according to certain conflicting estimates (which would be roughly in the range of $1/bottle). The collection firm reportedly made about $150 selling the empties to a recycling plant.

The suspect faces up to 10 years in prison for theft; his three friends — who apparently were unaware that they were doing anything wrong in dumping the ice tea — are said to be in no legal jeopardy.

[image credit: Rocky Lubbers]

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