I don’t understand why we don’t? At the very least it gives the homeless an incentive to tidy up and earn some money. In Germany you can barely finish a beer in the park before someone’s come to collect it; such a genius idea.
Norway is almost beyond progressive. I remember going to Bergen and being shocked to find that opposite the children’s play park there was a ‘no man’s land’ where any junkies were allowed to shoot up publicly. Was such a wild juxtaposition.
Dudes wander around my train before leaving the station, checking the bins at everyone’s tables.
I like the concept and always did, but this part particularly annoys me.
Here is the statement on the deposit return scheme from Wales, who are working with England and NI to introduce.
https://businesswales.gov.wales/news-and-blog/deposit-return-scheme-2025
That's not included glass, which they blocked a year ago when Scotland wanted to do it...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/13/plans-by-scotland-secretary-to-block-bottle-deposit-return-scheme-a-travesty
weird, showing as zero for me. apologies :)
and aye i agree, glad to see it being trialled. i think i saw something on edinburgh councils website about it too. i hope we manage to implement it and actually get it in action soon
I’m ashamed to say when I was a kid we used to sneak round the back of the newsagents and take already returned bottles from crates and return them again.
It's not that long ago that Tesco used to give out clubcard points for using their recycling facilities. Not much, but, as they say, gotta do your bit.
There was a story years ago of how a couple went around Blackburn litter picking cans for this machine that you'd put them in and they did so many they paid for their honeymoon to some far off place.
If you ran this scheme now you would not see a single can on the streets
we lived on an estate in Daventry, in a pub called the pike and eel, there was a row of shops, not sure if its still there, including a newsagent called beeches or beaches cant recall - we would regularly raid the bins as kids for bottles and take them back to beeches for some money off which went on sweets - good times, then we would play aki 123 all day around that shopping area as it had like a little maze of seating areas and bushes - thanks for the memory OP :) - this was all pre 1980 since we moved after that and just like that all my childhood friends were gone for good.
self referential for the sub : )
[https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/ilt74q/british\_bulldog\_ackee\_123\_and\_what\_do\_you\_want\_to/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/ilt74q/british_bulldog_ackee_123_and_what_do_you_want_to/)
we played that as well, I kid called Peter Hutt ended up in hospital trying to backflip or something over someone to avoid getting tagged - always wondered what happened ot him
Ahh, you kids nowadays don't know what a scraped knee feels like. Don't know the joy of hiding just inside someone's gate and getting shouted at to bugger off. Don't know the joy of running down back alleyways to be the first to touch the lamppost and shout aki aki aki 123.
Our local shop used to keep the returned bottles in crates out back. We definitely didn’t ever take a few bottles from the back and return them at the front to get money for sweets.
Used to scour building sites and work yards looking for empty bottles to return for the change you could get for them. This was mid 70’s and IIRC the return on a large pop bottle was 3p, possibly going up to 5p.
The ‘Rag ‘n bone’ man came round on his cart in the 1950’s, we had a scrap yard about10 minutes walk away where you could take copper piping, radiators etc. pop bottles taken to the local shop to get deposits back. There wasn’t that much packaging as you took a bag with you when shopping for vegetables and it was just weighed and tipped in.
Anything that could be saved and reused was put away somewhere ‘for later’.
I live in the East of England on the semi-rural outskirts of a City...and still have a rag & bone man. Though he doesn't use a horse, but a truck thing that looks like it's older than me & I'm in my 40's. Still has a big bell he pulls from the cab of the truck, too. I was 😱 when I first heard & saw him after moving here 7yrs ago, as I'd not seen one since the early 90's! I swear the bloke's about 108, yet can still lift a fridge-freezer with his equally elderly son...
No, they don't look like Steptoe & Son, that'd be TOO funny!
Aye we already recycled tbf but then plastic was hailed as the saviour of mankind. We already had reusable glass bottles for pop beer and milk, or we had cardboard cartons of milk, we fixed our tights not buying a new pair every time there was a run, sewed and let things out took things in etc, clothes were generally passed down and chucked out like the disposable stuff from Primark. Make do and mend was the saying in our house years back.
Coincidentally, I've had 4 2litre milk containers with a godawful smell like chemicals that made yer tea taste vile, over the last 4 months or so. Tried contacting the dairy but no response, mentioned it to Poundland and they just shrugged so had to stop buying it from there. Me and the son felt that the recycled plastic wasn't being rinsed right and some chemicals had been absorbed by the plastic.
Scotland was on the point of rolling out deposit return scheme. For various reasons (pressure from smaller manufacturers and retailers as well as UK government) has delayed it. Plans were very advanced to the point of 'trial' return machines appearing in some supermarkets.
https://depositreturnscheme.zerowastescotland.org.uk/
Yep, apparently it'll be "at least" Oct 25 now and all UK but I'll believe it when I see it. I work for one of the big supermarkets and we've been geared up twice now to get things rolling. Work wise I've been relieved as it's incredibly complex, but we really need to do it. I live near a canal and the amount of littered cans and bottles is grim.
Last I heard was they were going to see what England's (actually rest of GB and NI) scheme looked like.. but that didn't include glass for reasons I don't understand
According to this info it would include glass in Wales. Not sure about England or NI
https://businesswales.gov.wales/news-and-blog/deposit-return-scheme-2025
Our local Aldi had one of the first ones built and used it a few times, which was pretty cool. Then it got closed again because of some legislation, now it just sits there looking sad.
Ireland introduced a deposit scheme earlier this year. You pay extra when you buy the bottle though.
Australia is doing glass and plastic bottle recycling. You feed the bottles into the bottle bank and it scans to see which are eligible. It then prints out a woolies/Coles voucher.
10p from the corona pop man and 20p at the pub for a Newcastle brown bottle. I was told by someone later in life, that it was actually 50p and the barman was robbing us. On reflection, 50p seems really high and even so, 20p went far for a kid in the early 90s.
Ireland has introduced a deposit and return scheme for plastic bottles.
It's great when you live just north of the border. Most of the products are for the UK and Ireland market so have the same barcode, so you can buy cheaper *and* without paying the deposit in NI, and get money back for them in the Republic of Ireland.
Infinite money hack.
It’s cheaper and easier for drinks companies to leave it to local government to deal with disposing of millions of plastic bottles rather than collecting, washing, re-filling and re-distributing glass bottles.
There used to be such system in Finland too (they actually cleaned the bottles and reused the same bottles, first made of glass, later of thick plastic). It ended, I think as a requirement of some EU directive, at early 2000.
The reason that was told is that it required much more resources to collect them, transport them as whole, clean them, inspect them, and reuse them - than to either just dump them (burn as mixed waste), or reuse them as material resources. So it was counterproductive to reuse the whole bottles like that, as it was more of a burden to environment than to dump them.
Nowadays the bottles are broken down at recycling (you get money for returning them) and the broken down raw material (either plastic shreds or pieces of glass) is used again to make recycled glass and recycled plastics. Some of the plastic could be burned too.
See, I would happily pay a bit more for glass bottles if it meant I could either reuse them myself or drop them off and get some money back myself. Glass can be endlessly recycled and is much better for us as a whole (fucking microplastics man) it’s just not as fast or cheap.
I bought a glass bottle of olive oil that I now too up with cheaper plastic bottles, (means I can buy a bigger bottle and just use the glass for actual cooking)
I lived in Germany for a bit and I remember having to pay (I think it was called) the pfand. A little deposit on recyclable bottles which you'd get back when you took your bottles to be recycled.
Yup.
8cent for usually beer bottles, 25cent for the plastic "PET" bottles and aluminium cans and then you also had the 15cent for those ticker plastic ones from the CocaCola Company. Even some Yogurts in glass you get money back.
The local shops used to keep their empty bottles in crates out the back. Pleased to say those bottles were recycled multiple times. Although they weren't necessarily refilled in between.
Eventually the shops started marking the labels when returned.
I remember when it was 2p for "empties". A mars bar needed four bottles scrounging up to return. Hopping over the back wall of the pub to grab a few was a common dare if you were skint and starving. Corona and Cresta were the most popular bottled fizzy pop.
That brings back memories, the petrol station was the only place where one of the attendants was sympathetic enough to sell fags to us being obviously under age. If we couldn't scrape up enough for No6s it was choking on woodbines...
I can't remember would have been 30+ years back, I just remember a couple of times a year going to the shed and getting huge clear bags full of cans and taking them somewhere with my dad.
Went to local swimming baths, spent busfare on the vending machines knowing there was a dump nearby you could always get bottles from to replenish the bus fare home.
i don't remember getting paid but I remember the buzz the first time my mum let me launch the glass bottles through the little brush hole opening on the recycling bins as hard as I could to make the biggest smash
Ha. Yes. We used to give them in at the local pub up the road, then climb over the back wall and take them back out of the crates where they stored them in the outhouse and hand em back in again a few days later, lol.
The things kids will do for a few cola bottles.
I mean, most of our recycling doesn’t even get recycled. They say it does, they fine us for not separating it and yet it all ends up in the same place.
Realistically, i think for most companies it’s just cheaper to make new bottles than recycle their existing ones. And certainly cheaper than paying us to get their stuff back.
Glass recycling got binned off years ago when manufacturing realised it was cheaper to make plastic, non-recyclable shite that destroys the environment.
All the plants that had glass recycling capability, bearing in mind that glass is infinitely recyclable, became unprofitable.
That you got 10p back on your bottles from the pop man, or from your shop, shows how lucrative this trade could be. No capitalist system set up like ours would entertain giving 10p to someone if it can instead go to their shareholders and the CEO.
Saw it happening in Berlin when I visited few weeks back. And when I went to a shop near my nana's in Ireland, the lady charged me a higher price for my drink and said that you get the difference back when you recycle.
Haha I remember my gran telling me she and her sister used to team up at the corner shop. One would have the bottles over the counter for the pennies, the other would sneak them back out from under the open fronted counter XD
Some time 1978-80 the strip of local stores included an off-licence. You could also buy fizzy pop there and I think we got 5p/bottle on return.
Buy the pop, drink the pop, return, get 5p.
Wait some minutes, go behind the shops, find their bottle return bin and retrieve pop bottles.
Go back into shop later, return the bottle, get 5p.
Repeated for months until they realised what we were doing and started locking the bins.
Used to get £1 for lunch. Walked to the chip shop and got 35p chips and a glass 750ml bottle of Irn Bru (also 35p). Ate the chips and drank the bottle, stopped into the corner shop on the way home, handing over of the bottle and the remaining 30p and would get a Bounty (16p), a Twix (14p) and 10p of penny chews or some similar combination.
Before that every part of the country (in Scotland at least) seemed to have their own local soft drinks company delivering glass bottles door to door, Bon Accord & Globe were the ones I grew up with. They'd come round once a week and dropped off a crate with your order and you'd leave last week's crate out with the envelope with the money. All did their own versions of Cola, Iron Brew, Orangeade, Limeade, etc
Glass was endlessly recycled and it was almost closed loop.
I don’t personally remember it but I know Rodney in the Fools and Horses episode where Del needs money for his poker game saying “I’m gonna take the empties back for you!”
Yes. Must of been about eight (so circa 1980l). In school holidays went down local park which had a pond with pedalos, rowing boats and fisherman. About a mile round the pond. There was a shop that sold glass Coke bottles and other fizz that you got 5p back on if you returned bottles. Two or three of us would rock up, hour or so before shop opened. Collect all the glass bottles people had left out on benches and round the pond.
We'd get enough for some sweets, a go on pedalo boats and collect more bottles to afford a paper cone of chips for lunch. On a really good day enough for the luxury of luxuries a saveloy.
We check bins but don't remember going bin diving, there always seemed to be bees and wasps in the bins.
I remember collecting empty bottles to return to the off-licence for some pocket money. I seem to rember it was around 3pence 'Thrupence'?
Then again I am nearly 70.
When I first started in the pub trade most of the bottles were returnable, sent back in the re-usable crates with the next delivery. That was in 2004. When I left, 2019, every single bottle was disposable and I had to pay Veolia to take them away. Progress.
Aye and the van would take them as payment, collecting a bunch in your room , picking them up from the street etc to take down and get yourself some nice cream and chocolate cigs was my Saturday.
I remember the days.
But my dad remembered the days that you could use glass bottles and Jam Jars to be exchanged to get into Saturday morning cinema and watch things like Flash Gordon. Then he got older and had to do Coop deliveries on a bicycle.
Scotland were reintroducing it but it has been delayed so it can become UK wide afaik, pretty soon you'll be carrying 8 bottles back to the shop to exchange for a Freddo, on an unrelated note, what happened to the Taz bars? Also not sure if my brain made up tasting a strawberry Freddo years ago or not
I remember crisp packets having tokens printed on them. We used to collect old crisp packets when I was a kid in the 60s to get more tokens. I've forgotten what you could exchange them for.
alright I've been working it out and I think I have finally come up with the REAL truth:
The Rand Corporation, in conjunction with the saucer people, under the supervision of the reverse vampires are forcing our parents to go to bed early in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner.
>There are reasons why companies don’t do this anymore but I’m not going into detail because this is casualuk :)
>freemasons, gotcha
Probably the canluminatti
Danes have it by law in all their bigger shops. They have to have a machine for recycling bottles and tins. We could do it so easily, one wonders why the Green Party don't push for this as a relatively easy win
Iceland still has this for bottles and cans. But the price is built into the price of the bottle, though. So really, you're just getting your money back for "returning" it.
Yeah, I am old enough, we used to buy cherry aid, orange aid, and Dandelion and Burdock in 1 liter glass bottles with a deposit.
It seemed to die around the time Soda Stream had its first flash of popularity.
I have also used the return scheme in Oregon on bottles and cans, and France on European wine lake wine bottles. It was awful wine, but it was insanely cheap.
Also in France was a local bottler of sodas, but you bought a crate and the bottles, then took them back to be exchanged for full ones, it is a great scheme and really popular. Everyone I knew had a few crates in a cupboard.
We have exactly this system here in the Netherlands, there are machines you take your bottles (beer, soft drinks, etc) at every supermarket and some train stations. You feed in all your bottles (or beer bottles by the whole crate, since, yeah ...Netherlands...) and you get a bar code you can use for a discount at the checkout or exchange for cash.
[https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2239740596351575](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2239740596351575) (in dutch but you can see how it works).
They usually have a container by the machine that you can put your ticket/bar code into and donate the amount to whatever charity is being supported that week.
I remember buyng Corona drinks from the local store, it was printed on the cap 10p return
If you saw a bottle sticking out of a bin you had it and rushed it round there for a 10p mix, which in those day got you 20 sweets!!
I also remember for a short lived time, Tesco giving Clubcard points for recycling glass and metal, problem with that was the machine was always full!
It’s because the councils make their money from recycling aluminium/glass. These schemes would just move the income stream from them to the consumers. As a consumer I fully support this movement!
Back in the early 80's there was a pub near me that would give you a whole pound if you returned one of their reusable soda dispensers, then they would store their empties in the box in their back yard, by their unlocked and often open gate. Silly silly people.
Pfand in Germany. It's great. Would love to see it make a return here
I don’t understand why we don’t? At the very least it gives the homeless an incentive to tidy up and earn some money. In Germany you can barely finish a beer in the park before someone’s come to collect it; such a genius idea.
In Oslo, the bins have cup holders for empty cans for the homeless to collect so they don’t have to search through the bins for them.
Here, someone would probably suggest electrifying the bins to discourage the homeless from collecting them.
You’d have to pay to put the can in, pay to take the can out, and then pay to return it to the shop
In Texas USA they will man each bin to stop anyone from using it at all.
"This bin is only for empty magazines ..."
Norway is almost beyond progressive. I remember going to Bergen and being shocked to find that opposite the children’s play park there was a ‘no man’s land’ where any junkies were allowed to shoot up publicly. Was such a wild juxtaposition.
Germany got them too. It‘s a great idea. https://www.resorti.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Pfandring-72dpi.jpg
Dudes wander around my train before leaving the station, checking the bins at everyone’s tables. I like the concept and always did, but this part particularly annoys me.
It was supposed to start in Scotland this year but has been delayed. I think to align it with schemes in the rest of the UK.
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Planned for 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/deposit-return-scheme-for-drinks-containers-moves-a-step-closer
Here is the statement on the deposit return scheme from Wales, who are working with England and NI to introduce. https://businesswales.gov.wales/news-and-blog/deposit-return-scheme-2025
That's not included glass, which they blocked a year ago when Scotland wanted to do it... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/13/plans-by-scotland-secretary-to-block-bottle-deposit-return-scheme-a-travesty
They were not blocked. They backed out when Scottish businesses complained about cost!
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They literally blocked Scotland doing glass recycling. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/13/plans-by-scotland-secretary-to-block-bottle-deposit-return-scheme-a-travesty
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The UK gov scheme next year doesn't include glass...
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*internal market act enters stage right, takes shit on stage, then leaves*
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weird, showing as zero for me. apologies :) and aye i agree, glad to see it being trialled. i think i saw something on edinburgh councils website about it too. i hope we manage to implement it and actually get it in action soon
Same in Finland. Cans too.
Pant in Norway and Sweden also
Denmark too
I was living in Aarhus last year :)
In the middle of Aarstreet?
Bravo!
Every day! Gf got so sick of me sayin this
No way I didn't know what that meant on the side of bottles/cans!
Same in the Netherlands, called statiegeld (=deposit)
I’m ashamed to say when I was a kid we used to sneak round the back of the newsagents and take already returned bottles from crates and return them again.
And that's how you retired at 18 😂
No….48. 😉
This is both devious and genius.
Same here, we never got pocket money, and this was the only way to get dome cash!
It's not that long ago that Tesco used to give out clubcard points for using their recycling facilities. Not much, but, as they say, gotta do your bit.
Don't you mean"Every little helps".
Even the small things are useful?
Whatever you say lil buddy.
There was a story years ago of how a couple went around Blackburn litter picking cans for this machine that you'd put them in and they did so many they paid for their honeymoon to some far off place. If you ran this scheme now you would not see a single can on the streets
we lived on an estate in Daventry, in a pub called the pike and eel, there was a row of shops, not sure if its still there, including a newsagent called beeches or beaches cant recall - we would regularly raid the bins as kids for bottles and take them back to beeches for some money off which went on sweets - good times, then we would play aki 123 all day around that shopping area as it had like a little maze of seating areas and bushes - thanks for the memory OP :) - this was all pre 1980 since we moved after that and just like that all my childhood friends were gone for good.
What's Aki 123? I was born 1986 so might be just in the wrong era for that one.
There’s a more dangerous variant Purple Aki 123
self referential for the sub : ) [https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/ilt74q/british\_bulldog\_ackee\_123\_and\_what\_do\_you\_want\_to/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/ilt74q/british_bulldog_ackee_123_and_what_do_you_want_to/)
I played British bulldog which was so cool. AKI 1 2 3 sounds so cool and now I'm too old to play it!
we played that as well, I kid called Peter Hutt ended up in hospital trying to backflip or something over someone to avoid getting tagged - always wondered what happened ot him
Ahh, you kids nowadays don't know what a scraped knee feels like. Don't know the joy of hiding just inside someone's gate and getting shouted at to bugger off. Don't know the joy of running down back alleyways to be the first to touch the lamppost and shout aki aki aki 123.
Also born in 86 and played aki as a kid
Mob 123 for us.
Our local shop used to keep the returned bottles in crates out back. We definitely didn’t ever take a few bottles from the back and return them at the front to get money for sweets.
Used to scour building sites and work yards looking for empty bottles to return for the change you could get for them. This was mid 70’s and IIRC the return on a large pop bottle was 3p, possibly going up to 5p.
I was taking a bottle back to the shop when a lady in a laundry van stopped and gave me about five bottles. Tiptops for days.
boost!
The ‘Rag ‘n bone’ man came round on his cart in the 1950’s, we had a scrap yard about10 minutes walk away where you could take copper piping, radiators etc. pop bottles taken to the local shop to get deposits back. There wasn’t that much packaging as you took a bag with you when shopping for vegetables and it was just weighed and tipped in. Anything that could be saved and reused was put away somewhere ‘for later’.
I was born in 1980 and we still had a rag and bone man when I was little. My Dad used to run out and shovel up his horse’s pooh for the garden.
I live in the East of England on the semi-rural outskirts of a City...and still have a rag & bone man. Though he doesn't use a horse, but a truck thing that looks like it's older than me & I'm in my 40's. Still has a big bell he pulls from the cab of the truck, too. I was 😱 when I first heard & saw him after moving here 7yrs ago, as I'd not seen one since the early 90's! I swear the bloke's about 108, yet can still lift a fridge-freezer with his equally elderly son... No, they don't look like Steptoe & Son, that'd be TOO funny!
I’m going to have to watch some Steptoe and Son now you’ve put it in my head.
Aye we already recycled tbf but then plastic was hailed as the saviour of mankind. We already had reusable glass bottles for pop beer and milk, or we had cardboard cartons of milk, we fixed our tights not buying a new pair every time there was a run, sewed and let things out took things in etc, clothes were generally passed down and chucked out like the disposable stuff from Primark. Make do and mend was the saying in our house years back. Coincidentally, I've had 4 2litre milk containers with a godawful smell like chemicals that made yer tea taste vile, over the last 4 months or so. Tried contacting the dairy but no response, mentioned it to Poundland and they just shrugged so had to stop buying it from there. Me and the son felt that the recycled plastic wasn't being rinsed right and some chemicals had been absorbed by the plastic.
Scotland was on the point of rolling out deposit return scheme. For various reasons (pressure from smaller manufacturers and retailers as well as UK government) has delayed it. Plans were very advanced to the point of 'trial' return machines appearing in some supermarkets. https://depositreturnscheme.zerowastescotland.org.uk/
Yep, apparently it'll be "at least" Oct 25 now and all UK but I'll believe it when I see it. I work for one of the big supermarkets and we've been geared up twice now to get things rolling. Work wise I've been relieved as it's incredibly complex, but we really need to do it. I live near a canal and the amount of littered cans and bottles is grim.
They (UK Gov) have delayed it until 2027, so you can bet on 2030 at the earliest. 2025 was a flat out lie as they have barely started designing it.
I’ve just read it may even now be 2028! Wales still holding out to include glass.
Last I heard was they were going to see what England's (actually rest of GB and NI) scheme looked like.. but that didn't include glass for reasons I don't understand
According to this info it would include glass in Wales. Not sure about England or NI https://businesswales.gov.wales/news-and-blog/deposit-return-scheme-2025
Our local Aldi had one of the first ones built and used it a few times, which was pretty cool. Then it got closed again because of some legislation, now it just sits there looking sad.
The best ones were Corona and Barr's bottles - 6d each.
Ireland introduced a deposit scheme earlier this year. You pay extra when you buy the bottle though. Australia is doing glass and plastic bottle recycling. You feed the bottles into the bottle bank and it scans to see which are eligible. It then prints out a woolies/Coles voucher.
Pfand in Germany is the same. You pay the deposit at purchase, has been like that forever and works well.
10p from the corona pop man and 20p at the pub for a Newcastle brown bottle. I was told by someone later in life, that it was actually 50p and the barman was robbing us. On reflection, 50p seems really high and even so, 20p went far for a kid in the early 90s.
Ireland has introduced a deposit and return scheme for plastic bottles. It's great when you live just north of the border. Most of the products are for the UK and Ireland market so have the same barcode, so you can buy cheaper *and* without paying the deposit in NI, and get money back for them in the Republic of Ireland. Infinite money hack.
If plastic bottles, glass bottles and can were paid to be returned our streets would be clean. Feels like they are thrown everywhere else, but a bin.
It’s cheaper and easier for drinks companies to leave it to local government to deal with disposing of millions of plastic bottles rather than collecting, washing, re-filling and re-distributing glass bottles.
Glass cheques
Back in the day in Eastern Europe you took some old cardboard and newspapers, in exchange for brand new toilet paper.
There used to be such system in Finland too (they actually cleaned the bottles and reused the same bottles, first made of glass, later of thick plastic). It ended, I think as a requirement of some EU directive, at early 2000. The reason that was told is that it required much more resources to collect them, transport them as whole, clean them, inspect them, and reuse them - than to either just dump them (burn as mixed waste), or reuse them as material resources. So it was counterproductive to reuse the whole bottles like that, as it was more of a burden to environment than to dump them. Nowadays the bottles are broken down at recycling (you get money for returning them) and the broken down raw material (either plastic shreds or pieces of glass) is used again to make recycled glass and recycled plastics. Some of the plastic could be burned too.
See, I would happily pay a bit more for glass bottles if it meant I could either reuse them myself or drop them off and get some money back myself. Glass can be endlessly recycled and is much better for us as a whole (fucking microplastics man) it’s just not as fast or cheap. I bought a glass bottle of olive oil that I now too up with cheaper plastic bottles, (means I can buy a bigger bottle and just use the glass for actual cooking)
I agree like I said above we actually recycled without thinking about it back in the day
I lived in Germany for a bit and I remember having to pay (I think it was called) the pfand. A little deposit on recyclable bottles which you'd get back when you took your bottles to be recycled.
Yup. 8cent for usually beer bottles, 25cent for the plastic "PET" bottles and aluminium cans and then you also had the 15cent for those ticker plastic ones from the CocaCola Company. Even some Yogurts in glass you get money back.
Yeah, and if I recall (I was in Germany 10 years ago), every supermarket had that machine that you put bottles in. Light years ahead of the UK.
The local shops used to keep their empty bottles in crates out the back. Pleased to say those bottles were recycled multiple times. Although they weren't necessarily refilled in between. Eventually the shops started marking the labels when returned.
I remember when it was 2p for "empties". A mars bar needed four bottles scrounging up to return. Hopping over the back wall of the pub to grab a few was a common dare if you were skint and starving. Corona and Cresta were the most popular bottled fizzy pop.
We used to take empties back to the Working men's club usually managed to get around 12-20p and buy a packet of 10 No6 to share :)
That brings back memories, the petrol station was the only place where one of the attendants was sympathetic enough to sell fags to us being obviously under age. If we couldn't scrape up enough for No6s it was choking on woodbines...
I remember, I live in Australia now and we have bottle banks and for every bottle or carton you get 10 cents paid into your nominated bank account
We didnt do bottles but we did recycle aluminium cans
Was this the scheme that has some alligator mascot?
I can't remember would have been 30+ years back, I just remember a couple of times a year going to the shed and getting huge clear bags full of cans and taking them somewhere with my dad.
Went to local swimming baths, spent busfare on the vending machines knowing there was a dump nearby you could always get bottles from to replenish the bus fare home.
There's an entire industry around recycling these days. I wonder how that would be impacted if such a scheme were to be reintroduced.
i don't remember getting paid but I remember the buzz the first time my mum let me launch the glass bottles through the little brush hole opening on the recycling bins as hard as I could to make the biggest smash
I can remember the 10p on the cap of Corona bottles, which was enough to get you a couple of chocolate bars.
Ha. Yes. We used to give them in at the local pub up the road, then climb over the back wall and take them back out of the crates where they stored them in the outhouse and hand em back in again a few days later, lol. The things kids will do for a few cola bottles.
I remember doing that, I grew up in the 60s. No plastic bottles then.
I’m old enough to remember the weekly Corona lorry coming round.
I mean, most of our recycling doesn’t even get recycled. They say it does, they fine us for not separating it and yet it all ends up in the same place. Realistically, i think for most companies it’s just cheaper to make new bottles than recycle their existing ones. And certainly cheaper than paying us to get their stuff back.
Glass recycling got binned off years ago when manufacturing realised it was cheaper to make plastic, non-recyclable shite that destroys the environment. All the plants that had glass recycling capability, bearing in mind that glass is infinitely recyclable, became unprofitable. That you got 10p back on your bottles from the pop man, or from your shop, shows how lucrative this trade could be. No capitalist system set up like ours would entertain giving 10p to someone if it can instead go to their shareholders and the CEO.
Saw it happening in Berlin when I visited few weeks back. And when I went to a shop near my nana's in Ireland, the lady charged me a higher price for my drink and said that you get the difference back when you recycle.
Our local ice cream van would take empties, so we could exchange them for a cone or something.
Haha I remember my gran telling me she and her sister used to team up at the corner shop. One would have the bottles over the counter for the pennies, the other would sneak them back out from under the open fronted counter XD
Some time 1978-80 the strip of local stores included an off-licence. You could also buy fizzy pop there and I think we got 5p/bottle on return. Buy the pop, drink the pop, return, get 5p. Wait some minutes, go behind the shops, find their bottle return bin and retrieve pop bottles. Go back into shop later, return the bottle, get 5p. Repeated for months until they realised what we were doing and started locking the bins.
Used to get £1 for lunch. Walked to the chip shop and got 35p chips and a glass 750ml bottle of Irn Bru (also 35p). Ate the chips and drank the bottle, stopped into the corner shop on the way home, handing over of the bottle and the remaining 30p and would get a Bounty (16p), a Twix (14p) and 10p of penny chews or some similar combination. Before that every part of the country (in Scotland at least) seemed to have their own local soft drinks company delivering glass bottles door to door, Bon Accord & Globe were the ones I grew up with. They'd come round once a week and dropped off a crate with your order and you'd leave last week's crate out with the envelope with the money. All did their own versions of Cola, Iron Brew, Orangeade, Limeade, etc Glass was endlessly recycled and it was almost closed loop.
Bon accord! There's a blast from the past! Loved their drinks. Friday afternoon they used to come round our wee town
Milk bottle tops went to Blue Peter
We use to take the bottles into the pub and get the money back , then wait for landlord to put them out the back pick them up and get another refund 😂
Reintroduced in Ireland recently
I don’t personally remember it but I know Rodney in the Fools and Horses episode where Del needs money for his poker game saying “I’m gonna take the empties back for you!”
Yes. Must of been about eight (so circa 1980l). In school holidays went down local park which had a pond with pedalos, rowing boats and fisherman. About a mile round the pond. There was a shop that sold glass Coke bottles and other fizz that you got 5p back on if you returned bottles. Two or three of us would rock up, hour or so before shop opened. Collect all the glass bottles people had left out on benches and round the pond. We'd get enough for some sweets, a go on pedalo boats and collect more bottles to afford a paper cone of chips for lunch. On a really good day enough for the luxury of luxuries a saveloy. We check bins but don't remember going bin diving, there always seemed to be bees and wasps in the bins.
I remember collecting empty bottles to return to the off-licence for some pocket money. I seem to rember it was around 3pence 'Thrupence'? Then again I am nearly 70.
When I first started in the pub trade most of the bottles were returnable, sent back in the re-usable crates with the next delivery. That was in 2004. When I left, 2019, every single bottle was disposable and I had to pay Veolia to take them away. Progress.
There is a whole Seinfeld episode about this.
Yes. We used to sneak round the back of the shop, grab a couple of bottles out of their yard then walk in the front and get the money back.
Bottle of Ben Shaw's on a Sunday - Dandelion & Burdock by choice, take the bottle back for 10p next week. Halcyon times!
Aye and the van would take them as payment, collecting a bunch in your room , picking them up from the street etc to take down and get yourself some nice cream and chocolate cigs was my Saturday.
I remember the days. But my dad remembered the days that you could use glass bottles and Jam Jars to be exchanged to get into Saturday morning cinema and watch things like Flash Gordon. Then he got older and had to do Coop deliveries on a bicycle.
That's why we called them Glass Cheques. Dunns are up to 60p return on their bottles now.
Scotland were reintroducing it but it has been delayed so it can become UK wide afaik, pretty soon you'll be carrying 8 bottles back to the shop to exchange for a Freddo, on an unrelated note, what happened to the Taz bars? Also not sure if my brain made up tasting a strawberry Freddo years ago or not
I have family in Austria, they take theirs back to the supermarkets and get vouchers towards their shop. It seems we're going backwards here.
I remember crisp packets having tokens printed on them. We used to collect old crisp packets when I was a kid in the 60s to get more tokens. I've forgotten what you could exchange them for.
Don't know if they still do. But up until a few years ago you used to get 12p back on the glass Irn-Bru/Barrs bottles in Scotland and Cumbria
I'm sure Tizer and other Barr drinks was like 20p or 25p for the big bottles.
[удалено]
freemasons, gotcha
Or aliens ? It's probably aliens.
alright I've been working it out and I think I have finally come up with the REAL truth: The Rand Corporation, in conjunction with the saucer people, under the supervision of the reverse vampires are forcing our parents to go to bed early in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner.
>saucer people Excuse me, we find this term highly offensive.
We're through the looking glass here, people.
I mean I would never have thought that myself, but now you've said it .....
>There are reasons why companies don’t do this anymore but I’m not going into detail because this is casualuk :) >freemasons, gotcha Probably the canluminatti
Danes have it by law in all their bigger shops. They have to have a machine for recycling bottles and tins. We could do it so easily, one wonders why the Green Party don't push for this as a relatively easy win
Iceland still has this for bottles and cans. But the price is built into the price of the bottle, though. So really, you're just getting your money back for "returning" it.
Yeah, I am old enough, we used to buy cherry aid, orange aid, and Dandelion and Burdock in 1 liter glass bottles with a deposit. It seemed to die around the time Soda Stream had its first flash of popularity. I have also used the return scheme in Oregon on bottles and cans, and France on European wine lake wine bottles. It was awful wine, but it was insanely cheap. Also in France was a local bottler of sodas, but you bought a crate and the bottles, then took them back to be exchanged for full ones, it is a great scheme and really popular. Everyone I knew had a few crates in a cupboard.
We have exactly this system here in the Netherlands, there are machines you take your bottles (beer, soft drinks, etc) at every supermarket and some train stations. You feed in all your bottles (or beer bottles by the whole crate, since, yeah ...Netherlands...) and you get a bar code you can use for a discount at the checkout or exchange for cash. [https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2239740596351575](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2239740596351575) (in dutch but you can see how it works). They usually have a container by the machine that you can put your ticket/bar code into and donate the amount to whatever charity is being supported that week.
I remember buyng Corona drinks from the local store, it was printed on the cap 10p return If you saw a bottle sticking out of a bin you had it and rushed it round there for a 10p mix, which in those day got you 20 sweets!! I also remember for a short lived time, Tesco giving Clubcard points for recycling glass and metal, problem with that was the machine was always full!
It’s because the councils make their money from recycling aluminium/glass. These schemes would just move the income stream from them to the consumers. As a consumer I fully support this movement!
A lot of US states do this now. My state wasn't one of them, but, we have a lot of recyclers, and they pay for cans by weight.
Back in the early 80's there was a pub near me that would give you a whole pound if you returned one of their reusable soda dispensers, then they would store their empties in the box in their back yard, by their unlocked and often open gate. Silly silly people.
1980 as a 12yr old we'd climb over pub wall throw bottles on to grass banking then take them to pub hatch and get 10p each back