You Won’t Believe How Many Bottles & Cans Went Unclaimed In 2017

It's free money.  All you have to do is take certain recyclables to a claim center, and they'll pay you for them.  But you'd be surprised to hear how many go unclaimed.

Certain bottles and cans are worth $.05 in the state of NY.  If you collect enough of them, you might be able to pay for your coffee this week.  But according to a new study, billions of the recyclables went unclaimed in New York in 2016.

According to WGRZ, about 2 billion of them to be a little more precise.

The info comes from State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, New York collected more than $102 million in 5-cent deposits that went unclaimed during the state's 2016 fiscal year.

So what happens to that money if it's unclaimed?  The state keeps 80 percent of those unclaimed deposits and the "deposit initiator" -- in most cases, the bottler or distributer -- keeps the other 20 percent.