91–100 of 419 posts
My father was illiterate, which left him very few options in life after spending his early 20s in prison for check fraud. During the 70s, he discovered he could pick up cardboard and recyclables from local shops and grocery stores and take them to the nearby recycling plant for decent money. By the early 90s, when I was a young teenager, he would use me as free labor and I'd spend my weekends crushing cans piled as m…
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The cost of drinks largely hasn't increased in line with inflation, so you'd very quickly arrive at an unsustainable situation where returning a can/bottle would give you more money than it cost you to buy it.
It can never give you more than it cost — the redemption value gets added to the cost of the beverage. So a $1 bottle of Coke would cost $1.05 if the redemption value were 5¢ And it would cost $1.50 if the redemption value were 50¢. The reason the redemption value has not gone up much is that people would balk at paying so much for the goods upfront, IMO. Adding 20¢ per can would add nearly $5 to the cost of a 24-pac…
They might be reluctant but if there is no other way to get that sugary hit they will do it and eventually it will be just how things are done.
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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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of drinks largely hasn't increased in line with inflation, so you'd very quickly arrive at an unsustainable situation where returning a can/bottle would give you more money than it cost you to buy it.
It can never give you more than it cost — the redemption value gets added to the cost of the beverage. So a $1 bottle of Coke would cost $1.05 if the redemption value were 5¢ And it would cost $1.50 if the redemption value were 50¢. The reason the redemption value has not gone up much is that people would balk at paying so much for the goods upfront, IMO. Adding 20¢ per can would add nearly $5 to the cost of a 24-pac…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of drinks largely hasn't increased in line with inflation, so you'd very quickly arrive at an unsustainable situation where returning a can/bottle would give you more money than it cost you to buy it.
If it had kept up with inflation a 45c bottle including 10c deposit in 1980 would be $1.52 including 33c deposit today Instead it’s about $2
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It’s the ‘squash’ bit that I miss and makes me hate the deposit system. You have to keep the cans all fully intact, so the machine can read the barcode, so you have to give up stacks of room in your house and carry an awkward big bag of mostly air around to return them.
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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.
No. This is almost the opposite of a market-based system. Aluminium cans are artificially made available only at tens or hundreds of times their cost to produce.
You forgot externalized costs... add the cost of cleaning up after irresponsible people leaving behind their cans wherever they want or the added costs and pollution of making a can from fresh aluminium ore (bauxite), and suddenly that "ten or hundred times" becomes "at cost".
Deposits are a regulatory way to account for externalized costs, at least to a bit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
…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…
And the German system is a bit silly, too. 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.
There is a benefit: You rarely find plastic bottles and beer cans in the environment any more.