Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

> you can only make it work with a really low cost of labor.

Yet, isn’t that what automation provides? It has been two decades since supermarkets in the Nordic countries have whizbang bottle-return machines that take back plastic, aluminium, and glass bottles as long as the barcode is still legible. Is there really no way to make a machine that scans the barcode of various other forms of plastic packaging (like yoghurt containers, ketchup bottles, etc.) and then directs the item to the appropriate container? Since the machine will know the exact categorization of the packaging on the basis of the barcode, then consumers would not be required to correctly sort plastic rubbish themselves.

View on HN

Oh man, the Nordic nations. I remember studying abroad and being the industrious-borderline-alchoholic I am, taking the empties from any classmate I could, so I could re-up the beer supply for free.

Here in salt lake, however, we actually have to pay extra to have a glass collection bin at home. There are a dozen or so sites in the city that one could dump the glass, if they were so inclined, or into the general trash bin it goes. We certainly don't get paid for our our glass.

It's extra disappointing because local...legal strangeness, has been encouraging a bit of a local brewery boom. I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse, but that's not an option here.

All that said, there's a ton of plastic that goes into single stream recycling that isn't barcoded...

>I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse

This is one of the few cases where glass "recycling" makes sense. Unfortunately, glass is stupid cheap in terms of base material and production process so the only way to make recycling glass products worthwhile is to put the used product right back into service in its whole form (after cleaning of course). I'll try to find the study I'm thinking of but from what I recall, glass recycling isn't just uneconomical to recycle, it often winds up requiring more energy to recycle than it does to obtain the base materials and create a new container. Contamination knocks down the efficiency and the logistics of collecting and sorting glass are far less efficient than the bulk mining and transport of silica into a centralized production plant.

A possible solution to this, IMO, is to force bottling operations to standardize on a handful of containers in different sizes, colors/opaqueness, and closure type. This could also work hand in hand with a ban on plastic bottles for common products like juice, soda, etc. Marketing departments would hate it but the centralized redistribution of reusable containers that are useful to every bottling operation would finally make glass recycling a rational concept.

This is what a local milk company does in Illinois (Oberweis). You get $1.50 for returning the jug to the store.

https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/37924/2013/01/T800x600/3722a...

> force bottling operations to standardize on a handful of containers in different sizes

And voila, that's exactly the case in Denmark

(I live in silly valley now and it makes me nauseated to have to deal with all the waste here - I refuse all the packaging I can but rarely plan well enough to bring a stainless steel container)

No one gets paid for returning bottles in Nordic countries. They get the deposit back that was paid during purchase.

If you return other people’s bottles because they are willing to forego the deposit, then you do make some money. One of the ways that I survived my time as a skint foreign student in a Nordic country was picking up bottles in the city center on a Friday or Saturday night when everyone was drinking in the street and couldn’t be arsed to hold on to their bottles and take them back for the deposit. (I hear that now students find it harder to make money like this, because Roma immigrants have cornered this line of work.) Even later when I wasn’t so poor, there is pleasure in hosting a BYOB party and then being able to get the deposit for all the bottles and cans your guests brought.

Here’s one from my student days:

We define the derivative of a party as the amount of alcohol that can be purchased by returning the empty bottles left after the party. A good party is a party such that the second derivative of the party is positive.

A new giant type of automated recycling station has been installed around Sweden during the past couple of years, called the "Pantamera Express". I like this thing. You dump your stuff, it processes all kinds of things at a quite decent rate (~100/minute) and in the end you get a value check that can be redeemed in a grocery store.

Here's a cheesy video demoing it (turn down the volume):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWtJdB3-bwg

It's pretty big:

https://pantamera.nu/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/BFR_storpant...

The bigness is a good thing, most of it consists of storage space for (compressed) returned packaging. One of the more frustrating issues with the common variety of bottle/can recycling machines is that I nearly always get confronted by the 'machine full - call store clerk' message while feeding it. This takes up my time, the store clerk's time and that of the person waiting behind me with a bag of bottles/cans.

Exactly. That's been one of the core problems with the 80s-style in-store "chewers".

It isn't about products it's about opaque lids mixed with clear bottles. Films mixed with stiff boxes. Plastic mixed with food residue and stuck on labels. A tiny contamination can massively lower the value of the batch by making it difficult to work with/have limited usefulness.

Nobody is going to do that without a deposit, and that is hard to push through.

IMO use tax policy to drive it. Put a $5 tax on plastic clamshells and they’ll be gone in six months.

And replaced with “reusable” clamshells that somehow don’t count as plastic and they’ll be five times as thick and use way more resources to produce. :-/

Props to amazon for their frustration-free (and shipping cost friendly) packaging effort.

I have seen a marked reduction/elimination of clamshells the past decade of buying from them.

I'd love to complain to retailers nearby: "see this, I'm returning it and buying it from Amazon right now because of your consumer-unfriendly packaging"

Or cardboard boxes.

And there is the liability with "clamshells"

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/03/04/clamshell-pa...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com