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Comment by siruva07 | Hacker News Reader

The same observations are made on container deposits and recycling rates in the USA.

There are 10 states in the United States with container deposit legislation.

The US overall container recycling rate is ~ 33%, while states with a $0.05 container deposit laws have a ~70% average rate of container recycling.

Michigan is over 90% as its deposit is $0.10.

So why don’t more states have “bottle bills?” Because Coke, Pepsi, and the beverage industry oppose it

https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/regulations/article...

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Growing up in a state with container deposits (ME) I'm shocked that it's not a nationwide program. I guess that's why the bottles always list states where it's redeemable.

I wonder how the lobbying didn't prevent this in the ten states.

Government that works.

California has container deposits but as a consumer they’re impossible to get refunded. So while in Germany and Norway you’d take your bottles and cans back to the supermarket to return for credit, in CA we put them in the recycling bin and homeless folks come along and empty your recycling bins on bin night to collect any bottles and cans which they then sell to a middleman with a truck who sells them back to the one deposit return location in the city that will accept them.

Why do you say impossible? I can take them to my local recycling center which is open 9-5 every day of the year except Christmas, New Years Day and Thanksgiving, and they will gladly pay me back the deposit.

Impossible is too strong a word, but it's not very practical and at 5c a container not worthwhile to make a special trip to the single recycling centre in SF. Compare to Germany/Norway where the deposit is ~25c a container and you can just take them back to the supermarket.

Apparently retailers are obligated to refund CRV in CA but they just ignore the regulation: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/05/03/ca-lawmaker-pro...

This is something that’s much easier in the suburbs - if I wanted to, I could stash three giant trash bags in my garage, eventually toss them in my minivan and drive the 5 miles to the recycling center, which is about the same as my ordinary commute. I can imagine that that’s basically impossible to do if you live in SF.

There are weird externalities though.

Specifically homeless people. They all become deposit bottle entrepreneurs. They will often go places they probably shouldn't go and rifle through people's dumpsters and trash cans.

I'm not sure what to think.

When I lived in SF, people would break into our condo's private area just to rifle through the trash and recycling.

It came in for my state only a few years back. We returned ours a few times, but the novelty quickly wears off and it is really not worth the time. Now I just leave them sorted in a cardboard box out on the curb on our recycling collection day and they vanish pretty quickly due to the efforts of said deposit bottle entrepreneurs.

If you want to make dealing with the cans and bottles someone else's problem but also avoid encouraging the curbside "entrepreneurs" check to see if any local youth organizations do can drives in your area.

My kid's marching band program (in Oregon) collects over $10,000 a year from beverage deposits. It provides about 15% of their total funding for the year. They collect them once a month and will even pick them up from you if driving them to the school is inconvenient. There are dozens of organizations in our area doing the same thing.

What's wrong with employing curbside "enterpreneurs"? Would you be happier if they were begging on the streets, stealing, went hungry.. Over here, some enterprising souls tend to "acquire" (often steal) copper cabling, burn the insulation (regularly poisoning the neighborhood) and sell the remaining copper. I don't see why you would mind people collecting discarded bottles to return for recycling.

On another point, I don't think people go homeless in pursuit of bottle enterprises.

There's probably bigger issues to solve there, like the actual poverty that leads people to digging through trash to find can-shaped dimes? People aren't doing that for fun

Have the deposit system, _and_ force Coke + Pepsi to house the homeless! Problem solved (half-joking)

How often is the consumer who fronts the nickel the person redeeming the nickel? I suspect the nickels are, in aggregate, a regressive tax. I have no data, however, to back that claim.

What makes you think that? In states with the nickel redemption, I’ve often seen homeless people collecting cans and bottles to return. This makes me suspect the average redeemer has less money than the average fronter.

I would be willing to bet that the 99% pays at least 99% of those nickels and the 1% pays at most 1% of them.

I would consider those nickels regressive if most of them come from the lower half of economic distribution even if they all end up in the hands of the homeless.

But is a regressive tax bad if it is taxing something bad? (i.e. sugary drinks)

Diet drinks, unsweetened ice tea etc all pay the tax.

All just about as unhealthy.

As a native Californian, I’ve never redeemed a CRV in my life, and I’m not sure anybody I know does, either. The prospect of not putting recycling in the recycling bin so I can have another errand in my life is remarkably unappealing, especially given that I’d make less than a dollar a month for doing so.

There’s a certain amount of people rummaging through the bins on trash night, but only in urban areas, and they can’t be that thorough. I imagine that most of our recycling rate comes from ubiquitous curbside recycling programs, and the CRV goes to the waste management companies, who just keep it as profit.

I basically never redeem deposits either. My town recycling center, which I go to a few times a year basically to dump all my Amazon cardboard, has a place you can leave deposit containers for a local animal shelter so I accumulate and take it in along with the cardboard.

> the CRV goes to the waste management companies, who just keep it as profit.

It's part of the negotiation with the municipality on the collection contract. If you want to call it offsetting costs or profit, money is fungible; if CRV was eliminated, billing for collection would go up in the next contract.

I live in NY(C) which has container deposits. I don't personally know anyone that bothers trying to redeem the container deposit. I personally don't because it's really not worth my time at $0.05 per container. Particularly when I don't consume meaningful amounts of cans/bottles.

Technically speaking, any retailer that sells containers is also required to redeem them. In practice consumers don't really bother since no one really wants to wait in the (frequently long) customer service line to talk to people to redeem containers. Some larger retailers have dedicated machines, but I still don't really bother since those machines aren't very convenient to get to for me.

There's an entire "industry" where people pick containers out of recycling bins/trash/building-waste/building-recycling and then redeem it which creates interesting tensions with funding the NYC recycling program [0].

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/21/nyregion/new-york-city-fi...

> Michigan

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

~70% for a $0.05 is pretty good. In Germany, it's around €0.40, and IIRC, has a 90% recycle rate.

I guess just like Germany, poor people also collect the bottles for the $0.05?

There was a program where a city gave people money in exchange for cigarette butts. Obviously the poor people collected the butts.

Typically homeless people would collect them in places where returning the bottles was impractical. Trains stations are a good example. I remember many people would also leave the bottles on top of the bin rather than tossing them inside, to make it easier for them.

I lived a few years in Germany about 10yrs ago, and took a lot of trains (ICE). I miss those nice thick bottles. Much better than the flimsy ones we have in the UK and the whole redeeming of the bottles while doing your shopping was kind of fun.

> In Germany, it's around €0.40

I thought the deposit on single-use bottles/cans is (exactly) EUR 0.25, with significantly lower deposits for reusable bottles.

Interestingly, Switzerland has a high recycling rate for PET despite not having any deposit.

Switzerland is also the only country I’ve visited where everyone knew what PET is and could identify it from 20 paces. I remember going to a movie theatre and naively wondering if the dedicated PET bins had something to do with dogs.

Those bins are also exclusively for PET bottles, no other PET.

When I lived in Zurich for a few months the only trash bags that were legal to use cost around $3 PER BAG. Recycling on the other hand is free.

I don't know if that is throughout Switzerland but I reckon that had something to do with it.

EDIT: That was a long time ago. I checked online and a 17 liter (about 4 gallon) trash bag now costs 10.50CHF (USD 11.65) per bag.

The price you're mentioning is the price for a roll of 10.

https://www.coop.ch/en/household-pet/household-kitchen/waste...

Switzerland also demand you used biologically ropes when tying your old paper together. If not, they won't take it with them. Interesting country.

Do those recycling numbers take into account the number of people who don't pay a deposit, but get a deposit back? IE people buying sodas in Ohio and then taking them to Michigan to redeem a deposit?

The containers are marked with a Michigan deposit logo, assuming anybody looks.

Yes - when a person buys a bottle in Michigan, 10 cents is added to the cost. When they return the bottle to Michigan, 10 cents is given to them. However, when a person buys a bottle in Ohio, 0 cents is added to the cost. And they can't return the bottle anywhere in Ohio for any money. However, they can return the bottle in Michigan for 10 cents, even though they never paid the deposit in the first place.

So in that sense, naively doing (bottles returned)/(bottles sold) to determine the recycling rate of a state is wrong, because people will return bottles that were never sold in the state to begin with. So it would literally be possible to have a >100% recycling rate which doesn't make any sense.

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