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In Germany you pay a deposit when you buy a bottle and when you bring it back, you get your money back. At least when I lived there the system worked well. ther
by maxxxxx 8y ago
In Germany you pay a deposit when you buy a bottle and when you bring it back, you get your money back. At least when I lived there the system worked well. there is always a lot of pressure from industry to go one-way though.
- i_cant_speel 8y agoThat is also a thing in a few states. But based on the labels on the bottles, I believe it's maybe 4-7 states that participate in that program.
- berbec 8y agoThe bottles are labeled at your local plant for your area. My bottles talk about NY-NJ-CT.
- genocidicbunny 8y agoCalifornia has this as well -- CRV, but I dont see too many people taking advantage of it. Part of the problem is that most stores dont accept the bottles back -- you need to bring them to a recycling dropoff point that seem to be relatively rare and far in between.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIt's also too cheap. The deposit needs to be significant to make sure people bring things back.
- usrusr 8y agoOnly enough to make very poor people collect it. In most of the bigger German cities it is considered rude to put a deposit-system beverage container inside a public trash can, you are supposed to put them on top of below, or even in a special tray so that collectors don't need to use their little LED flashlights to search the inside. Some progressive beverage companies have even made it part of their brand identity to print instructions for easily accessible abandoning on their labels.
- Semaphor 8y agoHere in Germany, almost every store takes almost every bottle.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIs there a law or is it voluntary? I don't remember.
- blattimwind 8y agoWhen you sell something with a deposit on it you have to accept returns of stuff with deposit on it.
- fkistner 8y agoNit pick, things work differently for multi-way and one-way containers: - There are no special regulations for multi-way bottles (glass and plastic alike). Most stores will accept only those they are incentivized to, i.e. the brands they sell (manufacturers are eager to get them back to be able to reuse them). - As soon as a store sells a kind of one-way container (plastic bottles, aluminum cans), they have to accept, pay out the mandatory €0.25 deposit for, and properly dispose of each and every one-way container of that kind customers bring in (in household quantities). There is a clearing mechanism, since store's sales might not match their returns.
- majewsky 8y agoRe: one-way bottles, it was not always that easy. When the one-way deposit was introduced in ~2004, shops were only required to take their own SKUs back. This was absolutely horrible for consumers and producers alike, so retailers introduced the shared system voluntarily.
- fkistner 8y agoGood point. Fortunately, that seems to have been mandated by law since 2006 (at least for stores larger than 200m² ≅ 2150 sq ft).
- saboot 8y agoIt's now become a weird social welfare system for the homeless, some go around collecting large bags and drop them off at recycling areas for cash in urban areas.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI think that's not a bad thing. When I was a kid in Germany we always looked for bottles to return to make some money.
- acjohnson55 8y agoI think it's a perfectly fine source of cash for people in need and willing to hustle.
- Johnny555 8y agoIt's not optimal when the poor and disadvantaged are forced to sort through the trash of others to eke out a bit of a living -- without any sort of protective gear or easy access to healthcare to treat any injuries/illnesses. It'd be a little safer if they could just pick through recycling bins, but that's illegal [1] so they are forced to pick through trash bins. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Recycling-bins-are-targets-for-thieves-4162587.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Recycling-bins-are-ta...
- acjohnson55 8y agoGood point on the health externalities.
- nullc 8y agoThe recycling locations also significantly underpay CRV in my experience: if you show up with more than a small amount (I think the threshold is about 40 items) they'll only "pay by weight" at a rate that seems to be maybe half of the per item CRV (based on a single time I bothered to count it out in advance). Going more frequently with smaller amounts would pay more but waste more time... and I estimated that it didn't make sense to do so unless you valued the cost of the trip at less than about $1.
- mistrial9 8y agoalmost every rung of the recycling ladder is beset by small cheating like this.. second note is, many, many honest recyclers simply die economically after some amount of hardship, depending on the setup
- woah 8y agoIf the deposit was more than a tiny token amount, they could make money taking them
- acjohnson55 8y agoIsn't it also the case that the bottles are reused, rather than recycled?
- blattimwind 8y agoGlass water and beer bottles are reused, thick-walled PET water bottles are reused, while most plastic (mostly PET) bottles and all cans are, at best, recycled. For other and broken glass items there are glass containers pretty much everywhere, broken up by color (white glass, brown glass, green glass). Plastics delivered by consumers are separated but never recycled.
- fkistner 8y agoAssuming we are still talking about Germany, yes, plastics collected via "Der Grüne Punkt" (engl. the green dot, named after the label on the packing) are in fact commonly reused. According to official figures about 51% of plastics are recycled, 38% is burned [1]. [1]: https://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/129/1712978.pdf https://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/129/1712978.pdf
- maxxxxx 8y agoEven better!
- hocuspocus 8y agoStandard shape glass bottles are, and those have the smallest deposit too: beer, soft drinks, water, I believe that's it? Non-standard glass bottles are recycled. PET and aluminum cans are obviously recycled, not reused, and have a steep 25¢ deposit.
- majewsky 8y agoFor reference, Lidl (a German discount supermarket chain) advertises that ~50% of their bottles' PET comes from recycled bottles.
- cmurf 8y ago
- mymythisisthis 8y agoThat's what happened in Ontario Canada. We had a deposit system for glass bottles, but it was lost when 'recycling' and plastic bottles came. Both recycle and plastic bottles where an industry reaction to not wanting to have a deposit system.
- damoe 8y agoI was a kid in Oregon in the early 70's when they implemented a bottle deposit. It was $.05 then which would be $.30 today. To bad they haven't increased the deposit amount. You also could return older, non-deposit containers at the beginning. This spurred me and my friends to clean every roadside and field within reach of our bikes. For a month we made more money than we had known in our entire lives. Then it was over and a valuable lesson was learned.
- ngold 8y agoIt's a dime now, with 90% + recycling rates. But 30 cents is huge.
- skriticos2 8y agoIt's about 30 USD ct in Germany (25 euro ct) for plastic bottles (that you have to pay up front). Very few bottles are not returned around here.
- the8472 8y agoIt's not just bottles. Manufacturers must register packaging materials they use on their products with a central register and pay fees for all the packages they produce. Since january 2019 a revised form of the law is in force which also applies to packages used by online distributors, e.g. amazon has to pay fees for the cardboard packages it wraps around the manufacturer's pre-existing packaging for which the latter has already paid. There also are mandatory recycling quotas.
- anonymous5133 8y agoWe have this in California and it provides a basic income for many homeless people (at least they're doing something positive by picking up the aluminum/plastic bottles).
- hanging 8y agoIf they were picking up trash from the ground, that would be one thing. Generally, they instead harvest redeemables from existing recycling and trash bins... often dumping the remainder on the street or ground in the process.