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When I was a kid, the “bottle depot” was a very motivating way to go out of one’s way to collect stray bottles. Deposits at time of purchase have proven effect

When I was a kid, the “bottle depot” was a very motivating way to go out of one’s way to collect stray bottles. Deposits at time of purchase have proven effective. Put a deposit on every product with recyclable material using some generic measurement (like “weight of packaging”), such that when you return it you receive a quick and approximate return (in this example, by weighing everything you recycled and just not caring too much what the breakdown was).

nojvek 8y ago
This * 1000. The way things work nowadays is the supermarket chain doesn’t pay the cost of polluting the planet. Every goddamn product is planed obsoletion so it can be cheap with a fat price margin and the customer has to keep on buying every couple of years. Charge supermarkets for plastics and pay customers to return recyclable things and that’s a huge motivator to reduce landfill garbage in half. I’m also a big believer that we need better robotics. When I saw Wall-E I just got super excited by seeing trash recycling robots. Robots should be doing stuff humans don’t do, not replacing them. It shouldn’t be a zero sum game.
- JimboOmega 8y ago
  There are already some pretty impressive recycling robots, especially in the field of sorting out mixed recyclables (scanning the incoming stream and shooting stuff that matches certain parameters into a separate area). It's pretty cool, you should check it out. I don't know how economical they are but they still require human backup because of the sheer variety of (incorrect) crap put in recycling bins. You need to be careful putting taxes on these things because of their regressive nature. Who winds up feeling the pinch when you add a $.05/can tax on soda cans? Does that person really have time to make extra trips to the supermarket to redeem a few dollars worth of cans? Also while landfills are among the ultimate NIMBY things, we're not running out of space on this earth in any real sense. Some things are just not worth doing economically. Maybe we should go back to the old ways and have consumers sort into only a few categories that are easier to manage - e.g. "paper" and "bottles and cans", and not bother with the rest.
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    Have you been to a landfill? We shouldn't be doing that to our planet even if it was twice the size. The amount of garbage piling up on this rock is mind-blowing, and there's literally nothing we are doing about it once it's in the ground. It just stays there seeping out heinous juices into the surrounding area. People are worried about tens of tons of radioactive waste material that we're sealing inside special containers and putting in specially designed vaults when hundreds of tons of trash are being dumped per day per landfill. I'm not worried about people getting cancer from radioactive waste 10000 years from now, I'm worried about people catching the plague from all the footlong rats crawling over their local landfill.
    - mschuster91 8y ago
      > It just stays there seeping out heinous juices into the surrounding area. A proper landfill has multiple layers of protection to the ground below it and a web of drain pipes to ensure that the fluids don't collect up or, worse, leak out into the ground.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        How many landfills are proper landfills, and not half-assed landfills, or just holes in the ground? Out of all those proper landfills, how many are properly maintained? Like everything, protection and drainage degrades with time.
        bluGill 8y ago
        Are you asking about any first world country, or about random third world countries? In rich countries the norm is all active landfills are properly maintained. There are a few bad apples that are caught once in a while, and a number of long abandoned landfills that cause problems, but for the most part a landfill in any first world country is not an environmental disaster. In poor countries people just toss things wherever with no concern.
      - thachmai 8y ago
- notabee 8y ago
  The issue is energy. Energy to build the robots, energy to power their efforts. Both the power and the plastics come from the same finite fossil fuel resources and will get ever more expensive as extracting that resource gets more expensive. To tackle the recycling problem we have to tackle the energy problem or we'll make no progress addressing the essential cost. The only viable thing to do otherwise is reduce plastic production and use.
  - 2sk21 8y ago
    I agree but the only way we will reduce plastic production is if we price in the cost of disposal.
keeganjw 8y ago
This is definitely a great way to get people to recycle but I think the problem here is that because recycling companies can't send plastics and paper to China they don't have anywhere to sell the recycling to be reused. Not enough companies are buying it to make new products
- mgbmtl 8y ago
  That's often because the recycled materials are of low quality, due to lack of sorting.
ProAm 8y ago
Someone still has to recycle it (which isnt really happening in the US) and then they need to sell it for more than they are paying with the deposit return. This is probably not going to be worth the effort in the US. China was our go to affordable recycling partner, and now they have found to not be profitable enough to be worth it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
lacker 8y ago
The problem isn't that people aren't recycling enough. The problem is that recycling is now more expensive than landfills, because it is not producing valuable enough material. If we encourage more people to recycle, it will just cost even more.
- blablabla123 8y ago
  It depends Where you live, in a lot of countries/regions neither separated waste bins nor products from recycled material are available. In Germany Both is present, making the process much more ready and economic than in the U.S. I wished though that more People would support this System, both in countries Where it’s facilitated but also in countries that have no central System for that in place.
- dmortin 8y ago
  I wonder if PET bottles could be reusable if not crushed. If they are still usable then they would just wash them in the factory and fill them again. Of course, they could get scratched or something during use, but people could be taught it's better if you buy a scratched bottle than putting plastic bottles in landfills.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    It can be done. Two years ago I've seen it done with Coca-Cola bottles in Germany. They'd have those thick bottles with visible scratches coming from cleaning and reuse. About the same time as I first discovered this practice, they abandoned it for some reason; on my next trip, I found only regular, single-use bottles. To this day I wonder about the reasons behind this change.
    - spacenick88 8y ago
      German here, it depends on the chain of super market and some other factors but multi-use Coca Cola bottles are definitely still a thing.
    - obmelvin 8y ago
vinbreau 8y ago
Grew up in a rural area. 45 minute drive to nearest recycling center. My father would collect an entire truck load of bagged recyclables and bring it there. He would walk away with maybe 5$ if he was lucky. 5$ to bring 15 bags 45 minutes away... I don't see an incentive here for people who live in rural areas, which is quite a lot of people.
- blablabla123 8y ago
  Germany: 45 second Walk down the stairs for separate Paper, Glass, plastic/foil and bio waste bins - Even in rural areas sometimes to this extend.
  - thx11389793 8y ago
    Not to mention that there are often different bins for different color glass (have seen them in public areas, not sure if this happens for residential as well). And iirc you may get yelled at for doing it wrong
  - Wohlf 8y ago
    Rural and suburban means very different things in Europe than it does in the Americas, often orders of magnitude more distance.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  I took an entire truck load of household trash (cleaned out a house after tenants moved out), and it cost me $40 to dump it at the trash transfer station. Landfill space isn't free, so by diverting trash to recycling, your dad saved more than $5.
megaman22 8y ago
A nickel bottle deposit was a lot more incentive to bother with collecting bottles and cans when you could get a coke for a quarter, than now when you need to trade in grocery bag full. I remember in the 90s, we would always trade in our bottles before we went to the county fair, and that was enough for admission and rides and some fair food. I don't think the barrels and barrels of cans would get us in the gate anymore.
- bluedino 8y ago
  It's still 10 cents in Michigan
zaroth 8y ago
I’d like to see the deposit required be calculated based in part on the length of the warranty. The longer the warranty, the smaller the recycling deposit. If you want to sell a refrigerator with a 1 year warranty then it’s going to carry a $200 recycling deposit. Once you get to a 15 year, all parts (not just compressor), transferable warranty, the deposit can go to $0. The sheer amount of cheap shit that’s built to simply self destruct in a year or two when it could — for 25% more cost — last 10x as long, that’s what drives me crazy. It works out to be a regressive tax but appliances should last a lifetime not a couple years before breaking in a way where it’s cheaper to replace than repair. But since the durability is hidden information from the buyer, the market races to the bottom as long as durability is correlated with cost.
- andrewksl 8y ago
  I like that idea, but I suspect the big stuff is actually pretty easy to recycle. It's the little bits of plastic and paper that are a problem to sort.
  - zaroth 8y ago
    Paper should be sustainably harvested and at least it’s compost. There are compostable alternatives to single-use plastic which with the right incentives will be adopted across more and more retail/restaurant. My understanding is that those compounds are only really good for single-use and aren’t durable enough to replace plastic in its many many other forms.
bluGill 8y ago
Some states do have a deposit. What it really does is ensure that people don't drink generic pop. The people who would recycle anyway recycle, and find it more convenient. The people who wouldn't don't recycle. I'm probably being overly cynical above, but much.
gonvaled 8y ago
In Germany no beer bottle is discarded. It has .08€ deposit. Around bars, those bottles left on the street are collected by people with bags, or whatever. Bottles bought in the supermarket are cleaned, kept and returned. I don't know the numbers, but I would be surprised if more than 1% of bottles are discarded. The same applies for plastic bottles (0.25€)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

nojvek 8y ago

This * 1000. The way things work nowadays is the supermarket chain doesn’t pay the cost of polluting the planet. Every goddamn product is planed obsoletion so it can be cheap with a fat price margin and the customer has to keep on buying every couple of years. Charge supermarkets for plastics and pay customers to return recyclable things and that’s a huge motivator to reduce landfill garbage in half. I’m also a big believer that we need better robotics. When I saw Wall-E I just got super excited by seeing trash recycling robots. Robots should be doing stuff humans don’t do, not replacing them. It shouldn’t be a zero sum game.

JimboOmega 8y ago
There are already some pretty impressive recycling robots, especially in the field of sorting out mixed recyclables (scanning the incoming stream and shooting stuff that matches certain parameters into a separate area). It's pretty cool, you should check it out. I don't know how economical they are but they still require human backup because of the sheer variety of (incorrect) crap put in recycling bins. You need to be careful putting taxes on these things because of their regressive nature. Who winds up feeling the pinch when you add a $.05/can tax on soda cans? Does that person really have time to make extra trips to the supermarket to redeem a few dollars worth of cans? Also while landfills are among the ultimate NIMBY things, we're not running out of space on this earth in any real sense. Some things are just not worth doing economically. Maybe we should go back to the old ways and have consumers sort into only a few categories that are easier to manage - e.g. "paper" and "bottles and cans", and not bother with the rest.
- kungtotte 8y ago
  Have you been to a landfill? We shouldn't be doing that to our planet even if it was twice the size. The amount of garbage piling up on this rock is mind-blowing, and there's literally nothing we are doing about it once it's in the ground. It just stays there seeping out heinous juices into the surrounding area. People are worried about tens of tons of radioactive waste material that we're sealing inside special containers and putting in specially designed vaults when hundreds of tons of trash are being dumped per day per landfill. I'm not worried about people getting cancer from radioactive waste 10000 years from now, I'm worried about people catching the plague from all the footlong rats crawling over their local landfill.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    > It just stays there seeping out heinous juices into the surrounding area. A proper landfill has multiple layers of protection to the ground below it and a web of drain pipes to ensure that the fluids don't collect up or, worse, leak out into the ground.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      How many landfills are proper landfills, and not half-assed landfills, or just holes in the ground? Out of all those proper landfills, how many are properly maintained? Like everything, protection and drainage degrades with time.
      - bluGill 8y ago
        Are you asking about any first world country, or about random third world countries? In rich countries the norm is all active landfills are properly maintained. There are a few bad apples that are caught once in a while, and a number of long abandoned landfills that cause problems, but for the most part a landfill in any first world country is not an environmental disaster. In poor countries people just toss things wherever with no concern.
    - thachmai 8y ago
notabee 8y ago
The issue is energy. Energy to build the robots, energy to power their efforts. Both the power and the plastics come from the same finite fossil fuel resources and will get ever more expensive as extracting that resource gets more expensive. To tackle the recycling problem we have to tackle the energy problem or we'll make no progress addressing the essential cost. The only viable thing to do otherwise is reduce plastic production and use.
- 2sk21 8y ago
  I agree but the only way we will reduce plastic production is if we price in the cost of disposal.

keeganjw 8y ago

This is definitely a great way to get people to recycle but I think the problem here is that because recycling companies can't send plastics and paper to China they don't have anywhere to sell the recycling to be reused. Not enough companies are buying it to make new products

mgbmtl 8y ago
That's often because the recycled materials are of low quality, due to lack of sorting.

ProAm 8y ago

Someone still has to recycle it (which isnt really happening in the US) and then they need to sell it for more than they are paying with the deposit return. This is probably not going to be worth the effort in the US. China was our go to affordable recycling partner, and now they have found to not be profitable enough to be worth it.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

lacker 8y ago

The problem isn't that people aren't recycling enough. The problem is that recycling is now more expensive than landfills, because it is not producing valuable enough material. If we encourage more people to recycle, it will just cost even more.

blablabla123 8y ago
It depends Where you live, in a lot of countries/regions neither separated waste bins nor products from recycled material are available. In Germany Both is present, making the process much more ready and economic than in the U.S. I wished though that more People would support this System, both in countries Where it’s facilitated but also in countries that have no central System for that in place.
dmortin 8y ago
I wonder if PET bottles could be reusable if not crushed. If they are still usable then they would just wash them in the factory and fill them again. Of course, they could get scratched or something during use, but people could be taught it's better if you buy a scratched bottle than putting plastic bottles in landfills.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  It can be done. Two years ago I've seen it done with Coca-Cola bottles in Germany. They'd have those thick bottles with visible scratches coming from cleaning and reuse. About the same time as I first discovered this practice, they abandoned it for some reason; on my next trip, I found only regular, single-use bottles. To this day I wonder about the reasons behind this change.
  - spacenick88 8y ago
    German here, it depends on the chain of super market and some other factors but multi-use Coca Cola bottles are definitely still a thing.
  - obmelvin 8y ago

vinbreau 8y ago

Grew up in a rural area. 45 minute drive to nearest recycling center. My father would collect an entire truck load of bagged recyclables and bring it there. He would walk away with maybe 5$ if he was lucky. 5$ to bring 15 bags 45 minutes away... I don't see an incentive here for people who live in rural areas, which is quite a lot of people.

blablabla123 8y ago
Germany: 45 second Walk down the stairs for separate Paper, Glass, plastic/foil and bio waste bins - Even in rural areas sometimes to this extend.
- thx11389793 8y ago
  Not to mention that there are often different bins for different color glass (have seen them in public areas, not sure if this happens for residential as well). And iirc you may get yelled at for doing it wrong
- Wohlf 8y ago
  Rural and suburban means very different things in Europe than it does in the Americas, often orders of magnitude more distance.
Johnny555 8y ago
I took an entire truck load of household trash (cleaned out a house after tenants moved out), and it cost me $40 to dump it at the trash transfer station. Landfill space isn't free, so by diverting trash to recycling, your dad saved more than $5.

megaman22 8y ago

A nickel bottle deposit was a lot more incentive to bother with collecting bottles and cans when you could get a coke for a quarter, than now when you need to trade in grocery bag full. I remember in the 90s, we would always trade in our bottles before we went to the county fair, and that was enough for admission and rides and some fair food. I don't think the barrels and barrels of cans would get us in the gate anymore.

bluedino 8y ago
It's still 10 cents in Michigan

zaroth 8y ago

I’d like to see the deposit required be calculated based in part on the length of the warranty. The longer the warranty, the smaller the recycling deposit. If you want to sell a refrigerator with a 1 year warranty then it’s going to carry a $200 recycling deposit. Once you get to a 15 year, all parts (not just compressor), transferable warranty, the deposit can go to $0. The sheer amount of cheap shit that’s built to simply self destruct in a year or two when it could — for 25% more cost — last 10x as long, that’s what drives me crazy. It works out to be a regressive tax but appliances should last a lifetime not a couple years before breaking in a way where it’s cheaper to replace than repair. But since the durability is hidden information from the buyer, the market races to the bottom as long as durability is correlated with cost.

andrewksl 8y ago
I like that idea, but I suspect the big stuff is actually pretty easy to recycle. It's the little bits of plastic and paper that are a problem to sort.
- zaroth 8y ago
  Paper should be sustainably harvested and at least it’s compost. There are compostable alternatives to single-use plastic which with the right incentives will be adopted across more and more retail/restaurant. My understanding is that those compounds are only really good for single-use and aren’t durable enough to replace plastic in its many many other forms.

bluGill 8y ago

Some states do have a deposit. What it really does is ensure that people don't drink generic pop. The people who would recycle anyway recycle, and find it more convenient. The people who wouldn't don't recycle. I'm probably being overly cynical above, but much.

gonvaled 8y ago

In Germany no beer bottle is discarded. It has .08€ deposit. Around bars, those bottles left on the street are collected by people with bags, or whatever. Bottles bought in the supermarket are cleaned, kept and returned. I don't know the numbers, but I would be surprised if more than 1% of bottles are discarded. The same applies for plastic bottles (0.25€)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]