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UK 'could adopt Norway recycling system'
A Scandinavian system for recycling bottles is thought likely to be adopted in the UK. Advisers to government say the schemes have massively reduced plastic litter in the environment and seas. And a ministerial delegation has been to Norway to see if the UK should copy an industry-led scheme that recycles 98% of bottles. In the UK, figures show that only around half of all plastic bottles get recycled.
Norway claims to offer the most cost-efficient way of tackling plastic litter. The Norwegian government decided the best method would be to put a tax on every bottle that's not recycled - then leave the operating details of the scheme up to business.
It works like this: the consumer pays a deposit on every bottle, from 10p to 25p depending on size. They return it empty and post it into a machine which reads the barcode and produces a coupon for the deposit. If the careless consumer has left liquid in the bottle, the machine eats it anyway - but hands the deposit to the shopkeeper who'll need to empty the bottle.
Similar schemes are in operation in other Nordic nations, Germany, and some states in the US and Canada.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @05:01PM (17 children)
Same thing in Finland, although i don't know about the "leave liquid, lose deposit" thing. In here the new thin plastic bottles and cans are crushed immediately, so any liquid would just fall out. Older bottles with thick plastic could have that i guess.
I've actually returned bottles/cans to a shop in NY couple of times. I've been wondering why other shops (even in NY it was the only shop that had it that i know of) in USA don't have them, even though the bottles and cans do have that deposit. Although there are people collecting those bottles, so i guess they know where to take them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @05:41PM (4 children)
Those machines are quite common in Michigan, but we've got a $0.10 deposit on cans/bottles so a huge portion of them come back to the store. I want to say it's something like 90% of the bottles/cans come back, but I can't remember where I heard that number. At that rate, having a machine count them makes sense.
At $0.05, it just isn't worth it to bring them in for many people. That's doubly true if you're in a city where stuff is more expensive to begin with. Why bother with a machine if returns are rare in the first place?
(Score: 1) by starvingboy on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:12PM (1 child)
The $.10 Michigan deposit bought me a lot of candy as a kid. We'd scrounge all OVER the place for cans and bottles. Some even had the pull-tab tops, but if you mixed 'em in with a few other cans, the clerk would overlook it and give you a dime anyway.
It kept things tidy, and gave kids pocket money. Win/Win.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday February 08 2018, @02:16AM
Yea, collecting bottles used to be profitable. When they went to a nickel here, a chocolate bar was still a dime, and likewise, when they went to a dime, a chocolate bar was around a quarter.
30 odd years later, I took a couple of garbage bags of bottles, cans, juice boxes etc into the bottle depot, seems most stores no longer take bottles, and got about 5 bucks. Those small bottles/cans are still worth a dime and the bottle depot only gives you half the value, and a chocolate bar at a corner store is probably $2.
Felt I'd wasted my time taking them in compared to just throwing them in the recycling and really wonder about the homeless who I see with big bags of bottles/cans that they take from peoples recycling boxes, fuck they must have to work to get anything.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:14PM
I noticed recently the number of states where there is a deposit has been steadily dropping, as curbside recycling programs expand state wide. I've lived in states which tried the fee method, and everybody hated it, especially the retailers who had to put up with people dragging in bags of poorly cleaned plastics/glass/cans into their clean stores. It was largely an under-funded mandate and nobody liked it.
The culture of recycling is slowly taking over, but the success rate varies dramatically around the country.
We are quibbling about where the sorting is done. And to a lesser extent, who pays. Because recycling is not cost effective when all costs are considered.
The quaint idea that recycling pays for itself is about as bogus as saying prisons turning out model citizens. There is just no market for this stuff.
Where I now live there is mandatory curbside recycling county wide, and I think this applies to most counties in the state except the really rural farm areas. (You can opt out, but then you have to haul your own recyclables, because trash pickup won't accept them). The recycling extends to everything, un-sorted, glass, plastic, metals, paper, cardboard.
The sorting is moved to the back end, (post consumer) because the consumer side is horrible at this, even with the best of intentions. I'm not convinced a row of machines accepting only specific recyclables and rejecting others is any better than bulk recycle to automated separation/sort facilities. Its just more fiddling with who sorts and who pays.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:30PM
Yeah i only took those cans and bottles there couple of times, cause it was a little bit out of the way, so i didn't want to drive there too much. But the sites i've been to, you could probably make 50-200 USD a week just collecting the cans and bottles and if you were smart, just ask people to put them in a different container and you wouldn't have to dumpster dive. Easy money!
As i have always taken the cans and bottles back to shops, it just horrifies and saddens me that places like California it's seems so impossible and how much plastic and aluminium is just taken to dumps and thrown to ocean just because there are no collection machines around.
(Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday February 07 2018, @06:22PM (6 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:10PM
In Michigan there was a similar change. It cleaned up a lot of paper trash too. There was enormous opposition initially to deposits on cans and bottles, people screamed "communism", "socialism", and other misguided epithets. I saw almost a fist fight over it in Ohio. between middle aged people. Before the Bottle Bill [bottlebill.org] took effect, the roads we lined with all kinds of trash. There was all kinds of paper trash, too, especially once fast food became part of the culture. Obviously there were plenty of bottles and cans. These were the tough cans, too, not the squishy kind there are now. When you needed targets for plinking, every week there were already fresh cans and bottles. It was just a matter of walking a stretch of road and collecting for 10 minutes.
That changed rapidly once there was a sizable deposit on both cans and bottles. The surprising thing was that the paper trash also almost entirely disappeared from the roadsides, at least in comparison to how they had been before. At events it changed quickly, too. For a few months, some clever people figured out that they could volunteer to clean arenas and such. People were still in the habit of dropping their used containers on the floor. Teams filled up many large trashbags at each event. At the beginning it was very big money at big events, but once word got out, that tapered off to nothing quickly. Within a year there were basically no containers left behind at any even large or small. However, that was way back when it was actually allowed to bring your own refreshements.
It worked well and if I had my way, there'd be similar deposits on cigarette filters.
tldr: people started cleaning up their own trash, not just the stuff with deposits
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 08 2018, @12:59AM (3 children)
I saw an article on Finland having the best bottle recycling rates in the world - 98%, I think it was. There's no such thing as bottle/can litter in the parks; on big feast days (vappu, midsummer, open air concerts), there will literally be swarms of people ready to snarf your container as soon as you put it down on the grass. It's been like that for many decades.
In Japan, there's no such thing as any litter in the parks, or anywhere else in public for that matter, and it's been this way for ages, long before recycling was a thing. All you need is a culture where people actually care about keeping things neat and tidy. I guess if you don't have that, you have to resort to monetary methods.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 08 2018, @09:05AM (2 children)
I remember coverage of F1 Grands Prix in both the US and Japan where in one of those places you could see the crowd picking up their litter and taking it home (or at least to the nearest bin) in little bags, and in the other location you could see fans "disposing" of their rubbish by throwing it over the fence onto the circuit area.
Wanna take a guess which was which ;-) ?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 08 2018, @03:24PM (1 child)
Wow, learn something new every day: I didn't even know they ever held the F1 Grand Prix in the USA. I just Googled it and sure enough, it's been held in Austin, TX for a little while now.
Honestly, I'm surprised Americans even watch it. I thought they only liked races where the cars had engines with carburetors and pushrods.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:01PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @06:24AM
I went to a university in China, and at a volleyball game, a lady was asking me to hand her empty water bottles through the fence. I asked her how much she made by recycling the bottles, and she said about 2 yuan per jin (pound). At that time, a decent lunch at the (Chinese) fast food place cost 4 yuan, so it wasn't an impossible way of making a living.
(Score: 1) by Rich26189 on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:19PM (3 children)
In Massachusetts (northeastern US) many of the larger super markets have the machines that accept recyclable bottles and cans; crushes them and prints out a receipt. The receipt is then taken into the store proper where it can be 'cashed in'. The recycling machines are usually in a small enclosed space adjacent to but separate from the store entrance itself, I think that has something to do with keeping 'dirty' recyclables separate from the food you're about to buy. While it's possible that some bottle and cans wouldn't be accepted I've not heard that this is an issue.
In the US the deposit on bottles and cans varies by state and is printed on the label. Buy that product in one state and you'll pay the deposit, buy it in another and you won't. We shop in both Mass (deposit) and New Hampshire (no deposit) but don't pay attention to the deposit thing since our town has a pretty good recycling program which we use. There, I've signaled my virtue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:49PM (2 children)
Michigan, Massachusetts (even if impossible to pronounce), lots of Finns there. Never been to either one, but nice to know that it's not that bad everywhere in USA. I wouldn't mind visiting both of those states. Not that i would'be minded visiting Minnesota last Sunday, wink wink.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @08:04PM (1 child)
If and when you visit Massachusetts, look out for the Massholes [bostonglobe.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @08:20PM
Uhm, worse drivers than in California? Hard to believe.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday February 07 2018, @08:46PM
I can attest to the success of these types of recycling programs. In NYC bottle collectors are a common sight on recycling pick up days. They roam the streets picking up every friggin bottle and can they can salvage. They don't even care if it's full of piss, just empty that fucker out. In a big city full of filthy people, it's an enormous help.
The best example is the water bottle. Before they mandated deposits on water bottles they were all over the streets. You couldn't turn your head and not see a crumpled up water bottle on the ground. It was a real mess. I used to sweep up about 3+ from in front of our building each day and see the CA 10 cent deposit and wondered why NY wasnt following. Then they mandated that water bottles have a deposit in NYC. They disappeared from the streets overnight.