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Comment by hn23 | Hacker News Reader

Austria. In Germany it is the same ir worse. They introduced a deposit fee on plastic bottles a few years ago because the percentage of glas bottles sold was too low. So all super markets started to create their own proprietary bottles (only to be returned to the originator; not any shop as a glas bottle) and now even more plastic bottles are sold and not returned. Markets like REWE or ALDI make some extra money.

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Germany has a return rate of PET single-use bottles with deposit of 98.8%. Of which ~95% are recycled.

I wonder how much the numerator is biased by fraud like:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/05/fraudster-made...

and

https://www.toytowngermany.com/forum/topic/52114-lithuanian-...

Apparently you could produce fake bottles for a few cents and get a 5-15x return.

I'm not sure about the prevalence of this issue today but about 10 years ago I helped create a fraud protection system specifically targeted at deposit return fraud.

However, at the time at least the problem apparently wasn't so much people manipulating return machines but rather bottles miraculously appearing out of nowhere from within the system (i.e. parties trying to register a bunch of bottles more than once or attempting to remove bottles in-between checkpoints in order to "reuse" them later on).

My point is: The idea of the law was to reduce the plastic output but quite the opposite happened. Every bigger company introduced their own version of plastic bottles you cannot bring somewhere else.

Also your number is also very specific: Are there non PET single use bottles as well? What counts as recycling anyway. Shipping to China? Burning?

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