81–90 of 419 posts
This is why I have always thought that can and bottle deposit prices should keep up with inflation: to give the collectors a living wage.
Bottle deposit are there to incentivise some people to return them. They just need to be high enough to do that.
My family used to do this all the time when we were kids. We'd go along the ditches on the side of the road and make a family outing of it on weekends. At the beach my brother and I would drag big plastic garbage bags around and collect as much as we could from people who were happy to help some kids out and also happy to be rid of the bottles and cans. You could make some decent coin at it, but that was also in the…
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Nope, the worst thing a corporation can do is try to sell me something I don’t want. The worst the federal govt can do to me is imprison me, or worse, kill me. It’s time we hold these fascists accountable.
> Nope, the worst thing a corporation can do is try to sell me something I don’t want. I think poisoning your water supply with benzene might be a bit worse.
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For one, it would increase the attractiveness of fraud where the same bottle is sold in multiple jurisdictions with different deposit rates. Instead of collecting trash across the border, buy cans there by the truckload, bring them back across state lines, empty them and redeem them for the "deposit" you never paid. Of course, there are some plausible technological or political solutions to this. But it does change t…
…which is easy enough to fix with bar codes. This is how it works in Germany. You pay a deposit on every bottle. To get your money back requires a machine to recognise each bottle/can as legitimate, based on the bar code. Now, yes, people could print stickers with fake bar codes on… but I don’t think that would work well at the scale of the major fraud operation you’re envisaging…
The Einwegpfand was supposed (I guess?) to make Einwegflaschen go away and promote Mehrwegflaschen.
As far as I can tell, retail outlets just got good at crushing Einwegflaschen. An investment in capability that benefitted basically no one.
So. Are there any people on HN currently collecting cans?
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It's still sort of common in places with deposits on cans. In Michigan, I had a few friends growing up who did it to help their families. They got in trouble with the school on multiple occasions for digging them out of the trash, and what the school said implied it was that the school was profiting off the cans themselves. The episode of Seinfeld where they try to bring bottles to Michigan for the deposit always giv…
I've always been surprised that other states do not have bottle returns inside stores. What I used to routinely do in Michigan -- bring some cans with me to the grocery store -- I have never done in California, since you have to travel to a recycling center with limited hours.
It's structured as a tax on single-use containers that retailers can buy themselves free from based on the proportion they can demonstrate returns for, coupled with a shared recycling scheme they can join.
In practice it means you can return containers wherever you can buy them, and most larger grocery stores have machines to handle returns. (In fact, the largest manufacturer of "reverse vending machines" for bottles is Norwegian TOMRA).
Recycling rates in places without bottle returns in stores basically shows that just having recycling centres or even curb-side recycling from home is woefully insufficient if you're serious about dealing with plastic waste.
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For one, it would increase the attractiveness of fraud where the same bottle is sold in multiple jurisdictions with different deposit rates. Instead of collecting trash across the border, buy cans there by the truckload, bring them back across state lines, empty them and redeem them for the "deposit" you never paid. Of course, there are some plausible technological or political solutions to this. But it does change t…
Isn't arbitrage like that just how markets are supposed to work? Still ends up with the cans redeemed and disposed, just goes about it in such a way that the maximum amount of value is extracted from them.
This is why I have always thought that can and bottle deposit prices should keep up with inflation: to give the collectors a living wage.
But it isn't the size of the deposit that drives the return rate (95% or more here in Norway) it is the ease of doing it.
Here all shops that sell such goods are required to accept the containers in return even if they were not purchased in that shop and even if they are of a different brand.
So every supermarket has a reverse vending machine [1] where you deposit the bottles and cans and get a receipt that you can exchange for money or goods at the till.
[1] Usually from Tomra: https://www.tomra.com/en/collection/reverse-vending/deposit-...
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Why is this unsustainable? You would still have to pay for the drink and deposit before you get the deposit back.
For one, it would increase the attractiveness of fraud where the same bottle is sold in multiple jurisdictions with different deposit rates. Instead of collecting trash across the border, buy cans there by the truckload, bring them back across state lines, empty them and redeem them for the "deposit" you never paid. Of course, there are some plausible technological or political solutions to this. But it does change t…
Doesn't matter which way you slice it, it doesn't pay. The exception is if you can ship it on Mothers's Day.