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Comment by dvdkhlng | Hacker News Reader

We have something like what you propose in germany [1]. Basically it causes the producers of packaging to end up paying for the disposal of the corresponding trash. This creates an incentitive for producers to make the packaging less wasteful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)#German_dual...

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Do German manufacturers still pull tricks like selling a slightly smaller amount of pasta/sauce/cheese/crisps/juice in the same sized container at the same price?

Happens all the time in Canada/USA. Funny how they switch to the common metric or imperial sizes where it fits their interests. E.g. a lot of pastas went from 1kg to 908g, while pop bottles went from 560mL to 500mL.

This is known as shrinkflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkflation

Despite this, Germans seem to use a lot of bottles. Most German people seem to prefer to drink bottled water rather than tap water, even though tap water is of very high quality. They also don't have the concentrated drinks available in other countries (cordial/squash) and insist on shipping around diluted drinks in heavy glass bottles.

Yes, due to the insane amount of single-use plastic bottles being being wasted without recycling, we nowadays have to pay deposit for most bottles, which we then get back by returning the spent bottles to special collecting stations that use some computer-vision to check each bottle one by one for eligibility of deposit return.

So whatever you drink at home, you usually quickly start amassing lots of empty bottles at home that rot and wait for being returned to the supermarket.

Kinda bullshit though, it's been around for ages and in many regions there's no proper waste management.

Where I live you have to collect it separately and bring it somewhere on your own. The smaller towns next to my town oftn have this as a third/fourth bin next to general waste/paper/biological.

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