Comment on ‘Huge disappointment’ as UK delays bottle deposit plan and excludes glass
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 5 months agoOh absolutely! Dutch politicians tend to suck at actually implementing new rules that work.
I’ve heard about excellent results in some of the nordic countries like Sweden. From what I understand, you/they have machines where you can easily deposit a large amount of cans/bottles. We don’t have those here.
Our Dutch machines are basically retrofitted ones that used to just take in large 1-2 liter bottles. You have to put in one bottle at a time. That wasn’t a problem when they only handled big bottles, but now with cans and small bottles, there’s issues. For one, it takes ages to deposit cans. Because you have to put one at a time in. This means that if you’re stick behind someone who’s depositing two large garbage bags, it’s going to take a while. Also, because the cans are rarely really empty, the machines also get very sticky and break down a lot. In some supermarkets, they basically stop fixing the machines on busy days because… it’s just too annoying. So this means that it’s always a hassle to get your deposit back.
There’s also other issues like: cans can’t be dented in any way, or it won’t read them. And not every machine takes every deposit item. I.e. if you bought it at supermarket A and supermarket B doesn’t sell it… they won’t take back the item and give back the deposit. The machines also only really give you a ‘deposit ticket’, which you can either use to fund your groceries, or (theoretically) return to get cash. So there’s a lot of friction in the system between depositing a bottle and getting an actual deposit back.
As for why Swedish homeless don’t tear open bags… maybe you just have nicer homeless people than we do.
Right now in the Netherlands, around 95 percent of large (1-2 liter bottles) are returned, but only around 65 percent of the cans.
lud@lemm.ee 5 months ago
We do have some machines that you can just dump a whole bag of cans and bottles into and it will scan each bottle automatically. Those machines are comparably rare though, I think they mostly exist at larger recycling stations.
The most common machines by far is the ones that you have. It’s possible that ours are better. They certainly feel better (faster, more reliable, etc) now than a few years ago. For me returning cans feels often faster because they are shorter so you can put in another can more often. I hate how sticky they get though. Luckily most return stations have a sink nearby where you can wash your hands.
Our deposit system is operated by the same organisation and is the only one allowed to do so by the government. So you can buy and return your bottles wherever you want. And the stores gets paid some amount for providing the service for the organisation which then collects all the bottles.
We also do the exact same thing with deposit ticket. Works pretty well. Usually you can get cash but a few smaller stores in Stockholm refuse to hand out cash because they get a disproportionate amount of bottle returns, so it’s a hassle for them. The larger machines support Swish so you will get your deposit in your bank account within seconds.
One reason why I have never seen anyone tear open bags or pull out non bottle trash out of the bins, might be that many (like me) refuse to throw away bottles and cans. So there won’t be that many bottles in the trash, maybe one or two.
It’s interesting that your return rate for cans is worse than for bottles. Here, the return rate for cans is around 90% which is (slightly) above the return rate for bottles. Cans are also pretty important to recycled because aluminium is very recyclable and pretty bad for the environment to make new material.
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 5 months ago
There’s actually an interesting historical reason for that. We’ve had bottle deposit here since the days of glass bottles. The bottles would be sold, consumed, brought back, cleaned and refilled. Glass is great for that. The bottle deposit was generally set at 1 guilder. This was the currency we used before the Euro.
If you did your weekly shopping in say, 1995, you’d return your bottles and get a ticket. If you returned 10 bottles, that would be 10 guilders. Now, a FULL cart of groceries for a decent sized family would cost you a 100 guilders max in those days. So that bottle deposit took a nice chunk off that grocery bill. As a result, we had and still have a large percentage of bottle returns. It’s ingrained in people to bring back those large bottles since they’ve always done it.
Now, with cans… there’s a bit of a problem. The deposit for large bottles is 25 cents, but the deposit for cans and small bottles is 15 cents. That’s not a whole lot, especially considering how much the price of groceries has skyrocketed. Basically, the bottle deposit isn’t really a good incentive in terms of monetary value. It only really makes sense if you collect larger amounts of them, like the homeless.
They ARE planning to increase the bottle deposit - make it 50 cents in fact - as a way to incentivize people to bring them back. That will ‘probably’ work to an extent, but most people dislike the system for other reasons than the monetary value. And if those other issues aren’t fixed, raising the bottle deposit only annoys them further.
lud@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Here, the deposit is either 1 SEK (0,09€) or 2 SEK (0,17€).
Cans and small PET bottles are 1 SEK and large PET bottles are 2 SEK.
I’m personally of the opinion that we should make the deposit bigger because we might as well. We have had the current system for some years now and inflation obviously makes the deposit less each year.
And since the majority of people already deposit their bottles it wouldn’t affect them much at all and fuck the people that still refuse to deposit their bottles. Win win.