Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

It's a dime now, with 90% + recycling rates. But 30 cents is huge.

It'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.

It'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.

California 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.

It's also too cheap. The deposit needs to be significant to make sure people bring things back.

Only 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.

Here in Germany, almost every store takes almost every bottle.

Is there a law or is it voluntary? I don't remember.

When you sell something with a deposit on it you have to accept returns of stuff with deposit on it.

Nit 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.

Re: 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.

Good point. Fortunately, that seems to have been mandated by law since 2006 (at least for stores larger than 200m² ≅ 2150 sq ft).

I was looking for an intro on economics of reuse the the other day but I haven't found anything useful.

So, for example, if law allowed only for a small number of different container types (to turn them into a commodity) and then taxed production of those containers heavily, what exactly would happen?

Naively, one would expect companies to cut costs by buying second-hand containers rather than buying expensive new ones.

That would create a market for used containers. For an ordinary person it would be very much like deposit: Buy stuff with the price of container included, then sell the container to get back the money.

It would, obviously, provide a new way to cheat: Produce new containers and sell them as used ones, thus avoiding the tax. But that's just a tax avoidance trick and could be dealt with using the existing anti-tax-avoidance mechanisms.

It would be interesting to know what would be the unintended consequences of such a law.

A remember some stores stopped accepting recyclables after it became a pattern for homeless to scavenge for the good stuff and leave a mess behind.

Most supermarkets have bottle recycling ATMs (outside the entrance) around here in Germany. The homeless scavenging bottles from public bins and returning them are doing just fine. I'm not aware of the lot of mess this causes though, not sure what you are talking about there.

Sorry I was not clear. I meant in the US.

In oregon every store has to accept returns of at least what they sell, even convience stores.

Same in Finland.

It'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.

I 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.

I think it's a perfectly fine source of cash for people in need and willing to hustle.

It'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-ta...

Good point on the health externalities.

The 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.

almost 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

If the deposit was more than a tiny token amount, they could make money taking them

That 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.

The bottles are labeled at your local plant for your area. My bottles talk about NY-NJ-CT.

Isn't it also the case that the bottles are reused, rather than recycled?

Even better!

Standard 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.

For reference, Lidl (a German discount supermarket chain) advertises that ~50% of their bottles' PET comes from recycled bottles.

In my state glass is neither reused nor recycled, it's crushed and used as filler for things like environmental drainage projects. A big part of the problem in rural areas is the cost to transport glass makes it worthless to buy and recycle, and there's a high contamination rate, so increasingly it's back to the landfill for glass.

Glass 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.

Assuming 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

That'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.

We 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).

If 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.

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