Charity through apathy, genius.
Shoppers 'to be charged 20p on plastic bottles & Metal Cans under return scheme
- Thread starter chaparral
- Start date
Charity through apathy, genius.
It's a shame there aren't clean options of travel available to us! If only a two wheeled device existed where you could sit on it and move your legs in a circular direction to get along faster. Or if only these legs of ours could transport us to places by putting one in front of the other.
If only eh
Great idea! Execpt my recyling place is about 11 miles away, and even for me (someone who cycles a minimum of 8 hours a week) that's a pain to take some cans of coke to! Plus I'd then need to consider getting a bag etc for the bike.
lind of an employment drive. After the 4th July celebrations, the park would be cleared of cans and bottles by 7am on the 5th. Win-win for everyone.
Great, then it shows the scheme worked.
This system was around when I lived in Germany in the late 90s/early 2000s. It's much better than a recycling bin, because in the cases of bottles etc. they are actually reused rather than recycled, so you avoid the OMGTHEYTHROWITINTOLANDFILL issue. The machines are automated and it takes no time to put the bottles/cans in and get a voucher for the store.
Soldato
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remember a mate of mine (either a boomer or silent generation depending on whatever list you look up) describing how in his youth they had a racket where the kids would gather up all the bottles, return them to the store, then hop the wall out back to steal those same bottles and return them again for more money.
back when having a childhood meant you could have fun ofc.....
even into the 90's i remember having the classic plastic holder with the hood to stop the birds pecking through the foil lids.
and ofc when you tried to open a particularly obstinant bottle and your thumb would punch straight through the lid and splash milk everywhere......
i do think this is a good idea if it's implemented german style where you return it to the store you got it from, very convenient (compared to say going to a recycling centre) and as a byproduct encourages you to bring bags rather than use up new plastic ones.
of course this being the uk people are going to complain because apparently stuffing a bag full of empty cans and taking it with you when you go shopping is just too much goddamn effort (these same people don't seem to get you can still throw stuff away, just that if you do it costs more)
Even if same person picking it up and dropping it is different, the net result is less litter. The park I visit has so much I can take a black bin bag and fill it easy with one walk round. If there was insentive to do this it would be spotless. I expect a single black sack of litter would be 5 pounds easily
So it's only a good thing.
And if people don't want to claim the money can go to environmental incentives (I know that's a fantasy)
Caporegime
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Had the same system here with glass bottles. But they took it away. Like you can still buy glass bottles but companies don't buy them back off you any more.
Cans and bottles are two of the five things that our recycling collection actually takes.
Looks like we’ll be down to paper, cardboard and recyclable plastic tubs like yogurt pots. I guess it’s a win for the council, although I expect they actually make money from selling the metal they recover off the cans which of sets the cost of the rest of it.
I know they have these things on the content and the bottles are reused but their bottles are not the same, the gage of plastic is an order of magnitude thicker. Ours is as thin as they can get away with.
Looks like we’ll be down to paper, cardboard and recyclable plastic tubs like yogurt pots. I guess it’s a win for the council, although I expect they actually make money from selling the metal they recover off the cans which of sets the cost of the rest of it.
I know they have these things on the content and the bottles are reused but their bottles are not the same, the gage of plastic is an order of magnitude thicker. Ours is as thin as they can get away with.
Soldato
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yeah the german bottles are designed to be re-used.
makes sense i suppose, use 5x the material re-use the bottle 20x (citation needed on the figures)
tbh i reckon a lot of good work can be done by extending the re-use principle even further, make things that are good quality and last, design them to be serviced and actually sell spares. of course that won't come without regulation because no sane company is gonna take that profit hit.
I'm not convinced - might have a small effect on littering, but most of the litter I see is stuff like chocolate bar wrappers and crisp packets that wouldn't be affected. Could improve recycling rates, but everyone I know already does recycling at home, so would mostly impact bottles thrown in public bins, which seems likely to be quite a small proportion of overall waste, especially as an increasing number of busy public spaces (eg train stations) already have recycling bins along with rubbish bins - maybe this should just be expanded. Making it easier to manage a system of reusable containers might be a benefit, but that doesn't seem to be on the table at the moment, and with modern technology I don't see why reusable containers couldn't be picked out of a recycling conveyer belt at the tip by a robot.
It's not quite as simple as you make out I don't think. There's having to find somewhere to store non-recycling bottles etc until you next go to the shop (believe it or not many people's houses aren't actually that big, especially poor people and those living in HMO's etc who will be most sensitive to 20p here and there), inconvenience of having to carry them there with you (worse for someone that might go shopping on the way home from work after a walk / bike commute as I used to for example, so I'd have to carry round a bag of not-recycling all day and store it at work somewhere), and having to make extra trips if you would normally have had shopping delivered to your house. Also just general inconvenience of having another time wasting task to do at the shops.
That's actually a good side effect tbf, being a bit of a memory aide for taking bags shopping. Out of curiosity though did the German scheme allow for taking bottles back to a different shop from where you bought them or is it strictly back to the point of purchase? Would be inconvenient for vending machines, trains, places you don't visit very often etc.
Sure you could just put the bottles in your normal recycling, but it would be a pretty annoying feeling to be wasting moony like that for most people I think, so not really a good option.
It's not quite as simple as you make out I don't think. There's having to find somewhere to store non-recycling bottles etc until you next go to the shop (believe it or not many people's houses aren't actually that big, especially poor people and those living in HMO's etc who will be most sensitive to 20p here and there), inconvenience of having to carry them there with you (worse for someone that might go shopping on the way home from work after a walk / bike commute as I used to for example, so I'd have to carry round a bag of not-recycling all day and store it at work somewhere), and having to make extra trips if you would normally have had shopping delivered to your house. Also just general inconvenience of having another time wasting task to do at the shops.
Soldato
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from memory it was somewhat inconsistent, seemed to be that if it was something the shop sells it was fine regardless of wether or not you'd bought that particular bottle from that particular shop, but for example if you tried to return a large bottle of fanta to a smaller shop that didn't sell large bottles of fanta they wouldn't take it.
of course there's nothing saying that it couldn't be implemented such that all shops must accept all valid marked containers and recycle the ones that can't be returned to their suppliers for re-use.
when i was over there i was living in student halls- a 1 room apartment with en-suite "bathroom" (read: wardrobe with a toilet and shower in it) and storage was fine, just hung up a re-usable bag on a hook and dropped stuff into that, generally by the time that was full i'd need to be going shopping anyway.
Man of Honour
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Personally I think this is a terrible idea and is going to reduce household recycling which will in turn hit council recycling targets. We already recycle all cans/tins, anything plastic in groups 1&2 (council won't take any others), all glass bottles, all food and garden waste, all paper and cardboard. Now we will have to find somewhere to seperately store cans and bottles then drag them back to the store and queue up to get our money back. Terrible idea.
Soldato
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Will it apply to beer too?
It’s embarrassing enough trying to put them in the bin without making too much noise!
Never mind having to transport them somewhere further than the doorstep
I got a dude in my town. Big drinker. He comes with a sack of beer cans every weekend. He's always there it seems. I pray it's not just him drinking it all
. I don't actually pray cos that would be pointless.i remember the pop van coming around the estate and the caps would have "10p" printed on the inside etc, so you knew which ones to save to get a refund on.
i remember glass milkbottles too [and milkmen, not seen one of those in decades!], there were tall thin ones until they globally replaced it w/ the "pinta" [or was it "pinty"??] version. and the little 1/6th size ones for school too!
i remember glass milkbottles too [and milkmen, not seen one of those in decades!], there were tall thin ones until they globally replaced it w/ the "pinta" [or was it "pinty"??] version. and the little 1/6th size ones for school too!
It is a stupid idea, we have kerbside collection so its pointless. All this does is make recycling more of an effort than it already is, how is that a good thing?
Soldato
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because it provides motivation for people who are too lazy to even bother doing curbside collection?
If someone is too lazy to put cans and bottles in a different bin that gets collected from their doorstep like the rest of their rubbish, a couple of quid is not going to convince them they now want to collect it all up, carry it to the shop and 'trade it in' every time they go shopping.