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The deposit scheme in Germany is a huge cash cow as people pay for the deposit but then never return the container or the container gets destroyed, label comes off and gets rejected by the machine, etc.
And as you said, people leave empty bottles around public bins for homeless people to collect. However, this slowly became an accepted method of “income” for them and you see them checking every rubbish bin for empty bottles. (If a bottle isn’t quite empty, they’ll empty it onto the pavement.) And there are even territorial fights.
Also, lots of fraud with fake deposit coupons (you deposit the bottles in a machine, machine prints a coupon and you take that coupon to the till where you get your money - people now find someone with a label printer and print fake coupons to cash in).
And I loathe having to carry an empty plastic bottle around all day when I’m not near any place to return it. You can’t even squish it as then the machine won’t accept it. Which also means you’re taking huge bags of air to the store every few weeks.
I don’t see any issues with empty bottles and cans around London. Definitely not more than in Berlin. So I can only assume this scheme was proposed so that a few people can fill their pockets with the expected money. As always.
It’s sad that this is necessary and assumed “normal”. And I don't know about you, but I don’t like to step into some sticky puddle of something the second I take my eyes off the pavement.
They do! But in several shops the return machines were added without being connected to their payment system. Probably because of incompatibility. And people figured out how the barcodes are encoded.
The trash can be sorted. So why not make it a problem of the rubbish companies to properly sort the plastics and getting them recycled?
I’m living in the UK for a year now and I totally love the fact that I can just buy a bottle to drink somewhere and once finished get rid of it without wasting 25p or carrying that empty bottle around all day. Or that I can squish bottles at home before they go into the recycling bin outside.
As somebody that only shops for groceries every few weeks, I absolutely hated the several bags of empty plastic bottles we had to find room for, drive to the supermarket and then spend 20 minutes queuing for and feeding them one by one into the machine.
It's about incentivising bad habits, e.g. homeless people sifting through rubbish bins. People leaving empty bottles out in the street where they get blown around from the wind. Or arguments like "pensioners can just go and collect empty bottles if they want more money".
It's 2024. Automatic trash sorting machines are a thing - and they have a very high efficiency of up to 99.99%. Making people pay an extra deposit for plastic bottles (even just simple water) and forcing them to keep the empty bottle full of air until it is returned to a machine where it is then shredded to pieces is so late 20th century. (On a sidenote: In Germany alone, the companies producing these bottles "earn" 180M Euros every year just from bottles that got lost/weren't brought back to a machine - or not accepted (unreadable/missing label, deformed bottle, etc.).)
I mean, nobody is stopping you from e.g. separating used teabags into organic materials, metal staple and paper label, if you are into these kind of things. But please don't force other people to do the same.
In the same way I could say that people like me are the reason rubbish sorting facilities exist and people there have jobs? If everyone could be trusted to their part, there would be no need for these jobs. ¯\(ツ)/¯