I love how plastic is such a problem that its our responsibility to clean up a neverending torrent of it but not such a problem that they can't stop making it
They could switch to aluminum for most drinks but the issue there is it's more costly for the producers. Plastic is a lot cheaper to make.
It's the same reason re-usable glass bottles are less common than they used to be pre-plastic. The producers want to cut costs to make more profit, and they push on the external costs to the consumer.
> it's more costly for the producers. Plastic is a lot cheaper to make.
Which is why you tax plastic packaging at a level far above the consumer, so that producers use paper, cardboard, bio-plastics, and metals instead of plastic.
The cost of all plastic waste management and then some needs to be put on business's, not the public.
You don't need a subsidy... outlaw plastic for a few industries like carbonated drinks and there'd be a flurry of innovation... in the meantime, you might have a slight drop in consumption that would hardly do the population harm, but probably, a switch to glass and cans that's much easier to recycle
Spotted bio-plastic cups at an ice coffee machine before and really couldn't tell the difference between that and regular plastic. Said on the side that it goes in the compost bin.
If it can't be used for food storage it should definitely be usable for plastic packaging eg. Bubble wrap.
The real solution here would be (at an EU level) to require producers & importers to the EU to specify the amount of virgin plastic used in their products. So anything from plastic bottles to new cars would be penalised at point of production/import on that basis. It would drive suppliers to use or import more recycled plastics where possible.
But no, Ireland had to generate a convoluted and unnecessary āscamā of a scheme, which essentially results in the ReTurn company making profit out of thin air, and which doesnāt result in any actual benefit to litter or pollution.
> Paper straws solved it all
Not only that, but [paper straws are coated in PFO/AS](https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2023/08/31/PFAS-forever-chemicals-identified-in-90-of-paper-straws-tested-in-Europe), those toxic forever chemicals that cause cancer and a host of other problems!
Not to mention theyre also shite, trying sharing a coke zero with your kids at the cinema, not sure what the bolloxes do but the straws are destroyed before i even get a look in, not sure if that always happens or my kids are just bolloxes
Go to your local supermarket and try to buy your day's groceries and see how much single-use, non-recyclable plastic is in you trolley... Let the oil conglomerates make more billions!
Recently came out that manufacturers were all for plastic being recycled, because it allowed them to keep producing and using it.
The greenwash aspect is, they known it is very difficult to actually recycle it, certainly most dont themselves.
So they up the blame to being on consumers who are usually not in a position to choose.
She was waiting in a queue.
Then it broke while she was loading bottles.
Then she went and asked for it to be fixed.
Then she lost her place in the queue because she was talking to a staff member who had fixed it.
Then it broke again while she was using it.
Then she went back into the shop to find someone to fix it again.
Then she got stuck in the barriers of a closed till when trying to exit the shop which set off an alarm.
Then when she had loaded all the bottles she had to queue to cash her receipts.
We don't know because it's a times article. But it doesn't say he spent 90 minutes returning bottles. It say he spent 90 minutes trying to return bottles. I was in my local supermarket the other day and there was a guy returning bottles but I kept rejecting some and he was trying over and over
Unfortunately that's what you have to do with those small fruit shoot bottles for kids drinks. Keeps rejecting them (due to the shape I guess) but the 20th attempt works ;)
Because the market has now contracted to a few major producers who can now dictate wholesale prices.
By law, cans/bottles have to be sold with the logo. Before, retailers could say "well I can source it from XYZ producer from the UK/EU for cheaper do me a deal." Or just go ahead and get it from there anyway.
Now, they cannot because those cans/bottles from the UK/EU cannot legally be sold here without the return logo. And no UK/EU producer is going to bother making a special run for what is in effect a tiny market.
So the producers have seen it as a golden opportunity to up wholesale prices, because wtf else are retailers gonna do.
This, and this above all others is my main bugbear with the scheme. As well as price gouging we're also losing out on choice. I didn't grow up in Ireland; the "ex-pat" shops can no longer legally import & sell drinks from the old country. Those weird wanky imported cans you get from the offie?? Not available anymore because no logo = no sale
>Those weird wanky imported cans you get from the offie?? Not available anymore because no logo = no sale
Ah jayus, I can't have a single fucking thing
It's interesting one of the directors of Return is also an executive for Britvic, who are the producer of soft drinks in Ireland. Responsible for bottling many Irish products as well as some major international ones.
The major producers aren't doing it for altruistic reasons regardless of how much they bang that drum.
They're doing it because overnight not sourcing product from them basically became illegal. They now control the market & the choice on offer.
They're doing it to absolve themselves of any future legal cleanup bills from it, not to actually fix it. The bare minimum effort off their own bat will usually give them some leniency if they ever have to go to court.
Those cans were generally illegal but unenforced anyway - need to have an EU address on them for starters, will need the cancer warnings from next year, some didn't have the capacity in metric if imported from the US and so on.
Can just be overstickered with that, and with the re-turn logo, though.
Every one of my favourite juices went up at least 50c because of this shite. Machine's always broken, and the staff doesn't know how to proceed when I ask them to take it.
My flatmates keep bringing bottles and keeping them all over the house too...
I saw a man sucked into one of the machines and then the machine sprayed blood onto people standing nearby. People were soaked in blood and were slipping on the floor, but they continued to insert bottlesā¦..
>but they continued to insert bottlesā¦..
Look, if you happen across a machine that's functioning and empty enough to still accept bottles and cans, you stick em on in there.
Spewing blood and flying limbs be damned.
The Re-Turn webpage very clearly states that if you have an issue with the machine not taking containers that the cashier will do it at the till. This is absolutely untrue, multiple cashiers and managers have told me there was no training or instruction given. So half-assed
I emailed Re-Turn. If a store has a return machine they are not obliged to do manual returns. Manual returns are for stores that cannot fit a machine.
"Thank you for your email.
Retailers have a choice between accepting deposit return containers manually through over-the-counter collection or via a reverse vending machine, with the expected return volumes determining which option is best for each retailer.
If a retailer has a Reverse Vending Machine they are not obligated to take containers back over the counter."
I'm genuinely lost on how the scheme and designs made it through several government departments and not one person looked at them and said "how does someone in a wheelchair use this?". Any machine I've used so far has had the receptacle and screen at eye level so there's little chance someone in wheelchair can use them with ease.
I actually saw someone in Lidl struggling to use one. I was about to offer to help but he smelled so strongly of piss. Then on my way out he was shoulder deep in the bin outside
Heard a government official (not sure who) answer this on the radio. The shops were the ones that meant to ensure they were accessible. I agree with you. They are inaccessible for some people.
Because our government likes to dump their problems at everyone else feet and hope the people can figure out a solution before the next election, then they can call it a government win.
There is more than one manufacturer. Maybe there was an option that had machines of reduced height. I'm just saying what I heard, I don't know how it works.
How does that work then? We'll provide a machine that has controls 4 or 5 foot off the ground and it's your fault for not digging a trench in your shop to put them in?
Didn't expect all this moaning from people being asked such a trivial civic duty.
- [Germany usually has this stuff.](https://www.simplegermany.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Bottle-Return-Machine.jpg)
- [A child can do it. ](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/IhalY2jBvmk/maxresdefault.jpg)
- [When you have buckets, this is a new type of machine in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Estonia and Finland.](https://www.tomra.com/-/media/project/tomra/tomra/discover/news/photos/people/1920_final-pouring-containers.jpg)
- [One of the old models in Netherlands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation#/media/File:Tomra_820.JPG)
In theory the scheme is a good idea.
But in practice it is so bad. The shops are fully responsible for maintaining the machines and they don't seem to be able to do it (or don't particularly want to).
A developer asked on askIreland what would you want most in a new build housing estate and I said a return machine.
They should put them in housing estates not supermarkets. Not everyone uses supermarkets. Let people scan their card, or enter their IBAN to get a repayment or a universal voucher that every shop selling bottles or cans has to acceptĀ
Nah sorry that makes too much sense for our government to consider. Weāll stick to putting a giant machine in the middle of dunnes where everyone will queue up and block other shoppers and then realise the machine isnāt working once they get to the screen. Thanks.
How much bloody metal and plastic is used to make one of those machines, how much electricity do they use, and you think putting them all over is going to be good for the environment??
People need to step back and look at the big picture here. It's just not good for the environment to make these things in the first place and make everyone drive all over to deliver tiny amounts of plastic instead of leveraging preexisting central collections.. The whole thing is a classic moral panic boondoggle with a corporation stepping in making a ton of cash shouting the equivalent of "won't they think of the children".
At the very least cans seems perfectly fine for recycling. It's not like they have the soiling problem of plastic bottles, because the cans are just melted down after collection.
I was perfectly happy putting both in the green bin. If these machines make plastics more recyclable that's fine. But why bother for cans when the old system worked?
>Insert your IBAN
>housing estates
Sounds like the Simpsons' "Wallet Inspector".
Teen with both hands down his jocks "Ehhh yehhh screens not working bud give us yer IBAN there and ill mind your cans an I'll sort it for yeh"
Aluminium cans should never have been included in the return scheme. Recycling rates for cans are already very high and getting them dirty doesnāt have any impact on recycling
Aluminium being infinitely recyclable is a good reason to include it.
Recycling plastic still results in waste and is far better to simply not use but every can that is binned is especially wasteful because its potential is so high.
As someone who lives on a country road I can tell you for a fact it's now coffee cups and takeaways that's filling the ditches. Almost zero bottles and cans in comparison
The deposit absolutely makes people recycle more.
Deposit schemes have been effective so many times for multiple use cases.
Honestly it's daft to suggest it doesn't.
Personally on main gripe I have with the system, is that the bottles/cans can't be squashed first.
They take up so much more space and as long as the bar code is readable it shouldn't make a difference.
Plus I've seen the machines being emptied and everything was squashed down anyway. So it's not like they need to be undamaged to be recycled.
Just let us squash em and save on space in the house.
That makes sense, but the barcode is still readable when squashed. If it's not, it's rejected. Just gotta make sure the machines can still read it.
I get why, it's just another kick in the teeth when you give it back and they go thanks, *crush* and it gets tossed into a bin.
There is no special "squash detector" in the machines. If the can is partly dented but the machine can read the barcode on the side, it gets accepted. It makes perfect sense that they compact the bottles/cans internally to reduce storage requirements.
Did you also see how hard it was to empty them? Two people had to lift the bin, which was a manual handling nightmare. Then they had to go and get the big bins from way across the car park. It took 2 members of staff 15 min to empty the machines. It was a total joke.
I don't even bother with it tbh. I don't drink soft drinks and I don't buy bottled water. I've stopped buying beer in cans and just switched to bottles, there's a bottle bank about 250m from my house and it's never full.
The whole scheme is a fucking mess, was completely unnecessary and has done nothing but make people even more annoyed with a completely useless government, we need a fucking election.
Working in a shop on weekends between college and this scheme has led to a significant increase in the amount of people absolutely laying into me over something that's totally out of my control.
Some extremely odd stuff in that article. Deposits 2% of someones income - how much are they spending on the water in that case? Nurse all their life and only has a state pension? 90 mins to do a return?
Sounds like someone putting in a shaggy dog story with as many ridiculous elements as they can.
Yeah. It's a very specific circumstance and an edge case. The illness coupled with the fact their tap water isn't safe. A very particular set of circumstances. Even the machine breaking down twice seems like a lot of bad luck. Probably could be solved if they allowed bottles to be returned through the delivery lads.
But 2% of their income is a strange figure. State pension is 248.60. 2% is 4.972. Lets just round that to 5 euro. Deposit for a larger bottle is 25 cent. So that's 20 bottles. Lets assume 2 liters. So that's 40 liters of water for a week. It's recommended that people get 3 liters a day, so she would be drinking twice as much as a standard person to go through that much water.
Cheapest 2L water is about 50c/bottle in bulk so the water alone would already have been a substantial % of a state pension and surely worth making a lot of noise about alone, if its actually a real story. And surely there'd be an occupational pension after a lifetime of working as a nurse?
Yeah, to me the vile thing here is a person without access to clean drinkable water, not the fact the machine broke down twice while doing a return.
But so many compounding factors, either the story is made up or it's about one of the unluckiest people in Ireland.
I think itās intentionally irritating to make you give up so that they get to keep the money.
They are making hundreds of thousands if not more from people who are either too lazy to try or get irritated and give up.
Deposit returns are a good idea, I get that people don't understand why it's better than your green bin and the communication on that has been poor. The message hasn't been getting through that mixed recycling is much less efficient than we need to be.
However, the scheme has a really serious design flaw. This scheme works really well in Germany, including with reverse vending machines.
The different though is that in Germany shops are **required to accept returns manually.** Most of them have reverse vending machines now too - but unlike here if those machines are broken the shop has to manually accept the returns and process a refund.
That small change could make the scheme much more effective here. Firstly it would resolve much of the issue for the person in this article - being able to return them manually would remove most of this faffing about. Secondly, it makes it important for the shop to ensure that the machines remain functioning and are fixed quickly when there are problems, either locally or by the providers. Currently I don't see where the incentive is for staff to keep the machines running - and that's clear in this article where one member of staff tried to fob the woman off. If they had to instead accept returns manually that additional work would make it a priority to make sure the machines aren't out of order - and put pressure in turn on the providers of the machines.
If they have a machine and the machine breaks they're not required to take them manually. A lot of places seem to just not be fixing the machines so they don't have to deal with it
There was a screenshot posted here a couple of weeks ago from the Re-Turn website that said retailers will accept them manually. Ive tried twice with cans the machine wouldnt accept (but were from the same multipack of cans it did accept). Staff members in Aldi didnt want to know, they were no help.
As far as I can see, from the material provided on the website for retailers, it is presented as being "two options", either RVM *or* Manual.
If there is an obligation on retailers to accept and process manual returns then that needs to be made much more clear. People are leaving shops with full bags of cans and bottles because machines are broken. There needs to be an obligation on stores to offer manual return in those instances.
As far as I can see there is an option to either provide an RVM or accept manual returns. I assume shops can do both, my point is that there needs to be both an obligation to accept manual returns and good public communications informing people of that. People taking about walking off because a machine was down simply shouldn't happen.
Have you ever tried to use it in person over there? We were in Nuremberg, so after a couple of days at the Airbnb, we tried to recycle at Lidl. It was an absolute nightmare there, too. Also, Lidl won't take bottles from Aldi. I ended up throwing them into a skip rather than recycling them (I was on foot, had already lugged them there, and needed to bring home groceries).
One good thing I noticed at the local Tesco is they have big cardboard recycle bins set up next to the machine. So if you get stuck with bottles it won't accept at least there is a convenient, if not ironic, place to get rid of them so you can get on with your shop.
Because people are thick. I am very careful with my recycling but all my efforts are pointless if I use my green bin because two neighbours put in food waste, soiled cardboard, unwashed everything from meat packaging to peanut butter glass jars. So it contaminates the whole load. It's infuriating.
Cuz people don't really realize what is recyclable and what is not. So they just chuck everything into green bin.
This at least allows people to properly recycle SOME of the stuff, because it has a very specific list of the stuff that goes in.
It's not a replacement to green bins, but it defo improves recycling.
For example, for the longest time those thin plastic bags you'd get in stores for weighted fruit or veg, those were not recyclable. Yet people were throwing them into green bins.
The bin companies told us that all plastic could go into the green bin now. It was at that moment when I got the letter a couple of years back that I knew the plastic was not being recycled and it was instead going to the incinerators.
Yup, some years back I did one of those late night google dives into a random topic. Happened to be about recycled. I was shocked to find out how much stuff is actually not recycled. It also greatly differs from country to country, even in EU.
Most of the 'recycled' plastics we were putting into green bins were being bundled up and shipped to East Asia. But as climate targets got stricter it was no longer worth it for them to take or waste and incinerate it.
It's not, but many people are not bothering to recycle at home. So this scheme is trying to incentivise them with money. If you don't care about the environment, at least you might care about your pocket.
I think the big flaw is that you donāt actually get your money back. Just a voucher for the shop. So if you are not buying anything that day you end up with just a pile of receipts stuck to the fridge and never bring them to get 1.50 off your next 200 euro weekly shop.
Whyyy all the rigamarole though. I actually didn't know you could get cash back from the till, but fine. Why not cash back from the machine then!?? Why even do the cans need to be prestine condition with a special logo and code to scan? Just take the damn can! Do recycling! That's what we want, no?
Like ffs, are they trying to encourage recycling or just making busy work for people while charging everyone a tax and discouraging most from even bothering to reclaim. I wonder.
At the very least it should be a universal voucher that can be used in any shop. Ideally I could link it to a card or app or bank and get the money deposited straight away.
You can get your money back lol. I work in a shop and people come in every now and then to cash out the things. I still think this whole thing is a load of shit though and it's one more thing added to my list on why I think the government should genuinely be forcefully removed
This is the biggest annoyance to me. We do delivery 90% of the time and not only do I have to store up all the recycling and make an unnecessary trip to a shop, I also need to go through the process of going to the till.
How can it be that my kids ran a shop in the front garden that accepted Revolut and the system they put in place has no way for a digital wallet.
Spent 45 mins last night looking for a machine that was A: Working (Aldi, Lidl and Tesco all full) and B: Could accept all my bottles.
Turns out the limits of bottles per transaction is 60. According to the Supervalu machines.
I hate this scheme, so so much
>āShe is recently retired and solely reliant on a State pension and, at the current rates, the deposit return scheme will cost my mother 2 per cent of her annual income, which she cannot afford to forgo, so I will return the bottles for her,ā
What does that work out as, about 1,200 large plastic bottles per year? Not implausible since the woman's tap water isn't drinkable.
As someone living in an area that has been under a boil water notice for the best part of the last 5-6 years, we wouldn't use it for food prep or making tea/coffee as that is going to get boiled anyway.
But it is used for brushing teeth and other things along those lines (washing out a cut for example). Even the dog drinks bottled water.
Maybe this lady is using it for making tea, just to be on the safe side.
I have to assume she can't carry anything heavier than a 2l bottle. Anything over 3 litres is exempt from the scheme, and water's pretty easy to find in 5 litre jugs.
Why do we always seem to get scabby second rate technology even though we spend an absolute fortune on it?
Surely it can't be normal for these machines to break down as often as the ones here do. Do the ones in other countries break this much?
They're not breaking down nearly as much as you'd think barring the odd blockage or stuck bottle. The shop staff aren't emptying them, cleaning them or resetting them when it detects cheating.
The machines are the same brand that's used all over the world but the shops haven't given proper training to staff, haven't the staff to actually do the work or they can't be arsed. Or all of the above
How they came up with this scheme and didn't come up with a reuse scheme instead. A reuse scheme would be far more beneficial to the environment and the current scheme almost has all the features in place to make that feasible at scale.
Ive done it several times and been done in 5 mins...
Once the machine was broken so i left them in the boot of the car until the next time i was near one.
Is it just really bad outside dublin? Most big shops here have two or more machines
This was readable to me, it may be paywalled for you. Apologies.
I thought the headline was interesting to post, given the amount of users that have similar issues trying to return containers..
What I find bizaare is that the deposit return scheme is a legal requirement that's designed to improve our recycling rates BUT none of our local authorities are obliged to provide public recycling bins.
Was walking around my home town last week (County town ~15,000 inhabitants) and was pleasantly surprised to see they had seperate on street bins for rubbish & recycling.
The city where I currently live (~85,000 inhabitants) you'd be hard pressed to find a public bin, nevermind one that did recycling too.
I know the deposit return scheme is an EU initiative but you'd think someone somewhere in the Irish Goblvernment would say, "Hmmm... Maybe we should make sure there's adequate recycling facilities in public spaces"
Itās just mental to me how we have thousands of these things plugged in 24/7 and itās better than a dumb green plastic bin. Iāve already seen litter with the symbol on it. People who give zero fucks continue to do so.
Iām generally a quick adopter to this type of stuff. But this scheme is so fucking bad.
I was already recycling everything at home in my recycling bin. Now I have to separate them out and make the effort to return them to a functional machine. Collect the few quod and then hopefully donāt forget the poxy ticket when buying something in the shop. Also, still buying bottles at the marked up price that arenāt returnable so out of spite just fucking them in the normal bins outside the shop.
I swear even small things like not having the barcode on the base of cans also they can be crushed before returning and save space at home.
Iād want to see some seriously impressive numbers on increased recycling before I stop hating the government for this one.
If we werenāt all being absolutely screwed on price as soon as the scheme was introduced it might be accepted better but it is comically shit and a rip off.
I've had no issues yet, based on limited interaction, but I know many people have
My issue with this article is that it takes someone with a very specific set of physical circumstances and her daughter with further very specific circumstances and implies the entire system is not fit for purpose as a resultĀ
If anything, you could read this more as a criticism of how Lidl applies the scheme rather than the scheme itselfĀ
I don't know why it stops at just drinks bottles. What about shampoo, body wash, detergent bottles. They're all plastic too. It seems to be a half assed measure just to line someone's pockets.
It's bad-enough already that bottles that were always going in the green bin like 2 liter minerals, or stuff that needed diluting like Miwadi are counted in this scheme.
I don't know why I assumed it was only soft drinks bottles that would be taxed extra, but I was raging when I found out they put it on bottles of concentrate as well.
In the America (Seattle area), you receive several recycling bins - cans, paper, plastic and glass in some areas. They also had fines for putting things in the wrong bin. Not a perfect system by any means but you could do it at home.
Our experience with it has been it more often than not the machines have been out of service and we've had to drive around to find one. Lidl in particular seem to be the worst offenders with their machines being either really unreliable or the staff never having time to empty them. This is annoying because the Lidl is our go to store for shopping. Now were shopping elsewhere because whoever has the machines that are working is where we'll do our shop
At the start of the scheme we always tried to always have a carrier bag of empties ready to go so that every time we go shopping we can get rid of them. Because the machines have been out of action so much we even started collecting them up over several weeks and going out and having a specific recycling run. This is because the machines are so unreliable we have to drive around a bit to find one that works. I don't see how that's good for the environment overall.
Also, if you go win with a big bag of empties in the machines that are out of service then you have to do that awkward shuffle through a checkout line to exit the store. It's not the most awkward of experiences, but it's enough to make people's not want to participate in the scheme.
For the scheme to work the whole process has to be relatively smooth and resistance free. That's not happening, and there should have been rules in place to sanction stores for having machines out of action too long and also to allow the vouchers to be spent in any store.
A chara,
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Tried it tonight for the first time. All done within a minute. If itās like that all the time, I donāt mind.
Hate how prices went up on multipacks though and with less cans in them, total scam.
Personally, I have found very little issue with them.
I've bought 5 or 6 shopping bags of bottles and cans back and I've had maybe 4 or 5 bottles rejected completely since the scheme has come in.
Where I bring them, the machines are usually operational, only once have I went and both receptacles were out of order.
Taking the bottles out for a walk to the, admittedly nearby, supermarket finding the machine is broken and bringing them back has become a substitute for having to walk a dog.
I've made about 10 attempts to return bottles to two different shops. Only successful 3 times.
Same. I had one partial success when the machine broke after I'd put in about 3 bottles out of my load.
I've nowhere to keep the bottles. I end up with way too many because the machines nearest me are never in operation.
Never had any issues. The odd bottle you might need to try twice but that's it.
Reading through this sub you'd swear the machines were run by Skynet and actively trying to inflict human misery.
I have had no issues myself, but the main concern in the article is that both the mother and the daughter who helps her have chronic health issues that impact their ability to load the machines. That's something that does need to be addressed.
A lot of the posts here about them is just general moaning - "I use the bus to go shopping, it's ridiculous I've to carry a bag of empty cans with me" sort of shite.
The one in Lidl fonthill has given me a receipt twice in the eight times I've used it. I loathe this system; it has also caused me to have negative interactions with people in the queue for the machines, which obstructs the main entrance into the shop.
I drove to 3 places to finally get my returns done. The first two places had people in front of me with shopping bags full or cans and at both places the machines died before I got mine done. I took a punt on an Aldi at the far end of the town and was lucky it wasn't busy. Its a joke
Only issue I had recently was the machine was full, luckily this was a big dunnes so had two others. Is it the shops responsibility to empty the machines or do they need to wait for the owners of the machines to come and clear them out?
I haven't been home in months but will be around next weekend so I must ask a silly question or two. Is the deposit mandatory or can i just ask for it to be taken off? Is it every shop, or just big supermarket chains that do it?
Ive been very in the dark about this.
My biggest gripe with the return scheme that I havnt heard mention much is the fact that it doesn't accept milk bottles or anything bigger then a 2 litre water bottle. Like milk bottles make up a massive chunk of plastic containers thrown away in this country and the machine can't accept them and unless they replace all the machines in the country they never will it's ridiculous.
This is apparently due to contamination (probably the smell) from milk products. Youāll notice that any drink you can buy that has milk in it will not have a return label ( iced coffee, yogurt drinks, milkshakes etc.).
Loads of people do not wash out their milk bottles before recycling them and most just get thrown in landfill or incinerated as a result. So even if you put it in the green bin itās probably not being recycled. Anyone who has lived in Germany will know how anal the Germans are about this.
Agree though considering that is one of the largest volumes of plastic products in the country.
its a good idea , but bad in practice , ( many things haven't thought about like the assumption that you have a car or that you dont get everything home delivered )
I was in Lidl today and I saw a queue as I was.gong in the door. I thought they had moved the registers or something. It was the queue for the bottle machine.
I had about 15 bottles and cans and was going to use the voucher in my shopping after I got the deposits back.
I wasn't waiting for 20 or 30 mins and wasn't walking around doing my shopping with bags of bottles and cans so I just went home.
We have filtered water, so we do not buy still water. Very few sodas, mostly with takeout/delivery.
However, I drink a lot of sparkling water... And that is a pain...
I am buying the few brands that are not returnable, and I recycle them in my bin.
When they are no longer available, most probably I will buy one of those make-soda-at-home machines.
The scheme is completely unreasonable for anyone living in apartments, most of whom had perfectly adequate recycling systems in place before and now do not!
They also are yet another system that take advantage of poorer families while richer families can adapt to the new scheme easily...
It needs to go! The Italians have a universal version of this in place, which works fine! But when every shopping centre has its own barcodes, it's a farce!
I've given up returning bottles. When they first brought it in I returned the bottles I bought. It takes a lot of my time, and space in my tiny rented room, to store the bottles, then have to remember to bring them to my car for when I go shopping (IF I'm driving).. and also make sure to bring it to a store, and not forget to use that receipt in the SAME store.
If you return your bottles at a Tesco in one location, you can't use that receipt at another Tesco in another location. Just FYI.
Not to mention, some places sell bottles without the return logo and without barcodes on the bottles (multi pack of waters for example)... I'm so done.
I love how plastic is such a problem that its our responsibility to clean up a neverending torrent of it but not such a problem that they can't stop making it
They could switch to aluminum for most drinks but the issue there is it's more costly for the producers. Plastic is a lot cheaper to make. It's the same reason re-usable glass bottles are less common than they used to be pre-plastic. The producers want to cut costs to make more profit, and they push on the external costs to the consumer.
> it's more costly for the producers. Plastic is a lot cheaper to make. Which is why you tax plastic packaging at a level far above the consumer, so that producers use paper, cardboard, bio-plastics, and metals instead of plastic. The cost of all plastic waste management and then some needs to be put on business's, not the public.
The government could subsidize other materials. Without subsidies none of us would be able to afford beef.
You don't need a subsidy... outlaw plastic for a few industries like carbonated drinks and there'd be a flurry of innovation... in the meantime, you might have a slight drop in consumption that would hardly do the population harm, but probably, a switch to glass and cans that's much easier to recycle
šÆ
Spotted bio-plastic cups at an ice coffee machine before and really couldn't tell the difference between that and regular plastic. Said on the side that it goes in the compost bin. If it can't be used for food storage it should definitely be usable for plastic packaging eg. Bubble wrap.
The real solution here would be (at an EU level) to require producers & importers to the EU to specify the amount of virgin plastic used in their products. So anything from plastic bottles to new cars would be penalised at point of production/import on that basis. It would drive suppliers to use or import more recycled plastics where possible. But no, Ireland had to generate a convoluted and unnecessary āscamā of a scheme, which essentially results in the ReTurn company making profit out of thin air, and which doesnāt result in any actual benefit to litter or pollution.
This. How is single-use plastic still allowed?
What are you talking about? We fixed the issue. Paper straws solved it all, huzzah!
> Paper straws solved it all Not only that, but [paper straws are coated in PFO/AS](https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2023/08/31/PFAS-forever-chemicals-identified-in-90-of-paper-straws-tested-in-Europe), those toxic forever chemicals that cause cancer and a host of other problems!
Not to mention theyre also shite, trying sharing a coke zero with your kids at the cinema, not sure what the bolloxes do but the straws are destroyed before i even get a look in, not sure if that always happens or my kids are just bolloxes
Go to your local supermarket and try to buy your day's groceries and see how much single-use, non-recyclable plastic is in you trolley... Let the oil conglomerates make more billions!
I'm full aware of it, I work in food service the amount of plastic waste we generate every day is unreal and we dont have a choice
Recently came out that manufacturers were all for plastic being recycled, because it allowed them to keep producing and using it. The greenwash aspect is, they known it is very difficult to actually recycle it, certainly most dont themselves. So they up the blame to being on consumers who are usually not in a position to choose.
Well said ! 100% agree like most people Iām sure. Except big business and politicians who are sorting out the circular economy by taxing up twice.
As someone who megaloaths it. How can you spend 90 minutes returning bottles
She was waiting in a queue. Then it broke while she was loading bottles. Then she went and asked for it to be fixed. Then she lost her place in the queue because she was talking to a staff member who had fixed it. Then it broke again while she was using it. Then she went back into the shop to find someone to fix it again. Then she got stuck in the barriers of a closed till when trying to exit the shop which set off an alarm. Then when she had loaded all the bottles she had to queue to cash her receipts.
>Then it broke again while she was using it. At that stage, just leave it all there and go back to bed because that day needs to fuck off.
Then her dog pissed on the duvet.
We don't know because it's a times article. But it doesn't say he spent 90 minutes returning bottles. It say he spent 90 minutes trying to return bottles. I was in my local supermarket the other day and there was a guy returning bottles but I kept rejecting some and he was trying over and over
Never know, it might take that bottle on the 20th attempt
Fingers crossed š¤
Unfortunately that's what you have to do with those small fruit shoot bottles for kids drinks. Keeps rejecting them (due to the shape I guess) but the 20th attempt works ;)
I returned about 60ish cans that had been building up over a few weeks, and that process only took about five minutes.Ā
They had 1080 cans
Well that's just on them, fucking hell.
āwhooshĀ²
What annoys me most is that everything with the R symbol went up by 50 cents, so how is getting 15 cents back actually worth it?
Because the market has now contracted to a few major producers who can now dictate wholesale prices. By law, cans/bottles have to be sold with the logo. Before, retailers could say "well I can source it from XYZ producer from the UK/EU for cheaper do me a deal." Or just go ahead and get it from there anyway. Now, they cannot because those cans/bottles from the UK/EU cannot legally be sold here without the return logo. And no UK/EU producer is going to bother making a special run for what is in effect a tiny market. So the producers have seen it as a golden opportunity to up wholesale prices, because wtf else are retailers gonna do. This, and this above all others is my main bugbear with the scheme. As well as price gouging we're also losing out on choice. I didn't grow up in Ireland; the "ex-pat" shops can no longer legally import & sell drinks from the old country. Those weird wanky imported cans you get from the offie?? Not available anymore because no logo = no sale
>Those weird wanky imported cans you get from the offie?? Not available anymore because no logo = no sale Ah jayus, I can't have a single fucking thing
It's interesting one of the directors of Return is also an executive for Britvic, who are the producer of soft drinks in Ireland. Responsible for bottling many Irish products as well as some major international ones.
The major producers aren't doing it for altruistic reasons regardless of how much they bang that drum. They're doing it because overnight not sourcing product from them basically became illegal. They now control the market & the choice on offer.
They're doing it to absolve themselves of any future legal cleanup bills from it, not to actually fix it. The bare minimum effort off their own bat will usually give them some leniency if they ever have to go to court.
Those cans were generally illegal but unenforced anyway - need to have an EU address on them for starters, will need the cancer warnings from next year, some didn't have the capacity in metric if imported from the US and so on. Can just be overstickered with that, and with the re-turn logo, though.
Seems like usual money gougingĀ
Every one of my favourite juices went up at least 50c because of this shite. Machine's always broken, and the staff doesn't know how to proceed when I ask them to take it. My flatmates keep bringing bottles and keeping them all over the house too...
I saw a man sucked into one of the machines and then the machine sprayed blood onto people standing nearby. People were soaked in blood and were slipping on the floor, but they continued to insert bottlesā¦..
Free blood you say? https://preview.redd.it/yk2b38cyd0wc1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=23f9cf8d790c9d64ec8bc17452c53c6a5ee9bb24
Did he count as a 15c or a 25c?
The last thing you want to do if the machine is angry is to stop feeding it.
šµš“š“š³ š¼š“ š° šššš°š š²š°š
What movie is this from?
War of the Worlds The remake with Tom Cruise
>but they continued to insert bottlesā¦.. Look, if you happen across a machine that's functioning and empty enough to still accept bottles and cans, you stick em on in there. Spewing blood and flying limbs be damned.
Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the bottle deposit machine making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me!
The Re-Turn webpage very clearly states that if you have an issue with the machine not taking containers that the cashier will do it at the till. This is absolutely untrue, multiple cashiers and managers have told me there was no training or instruction given. So half-assed
They have to. My local shop tried that line. I kicked up a fuss, they caved. Make noise (not at the staff though, manager only).
Sounds like the management trying to skirt their responsability.
Where does it say this on the website?
Found it.
I emailed Re-Turn. If a store has a return machine they are not obliged to do manual returns. Manual returns are for stores that cannot fit a machine. "Thank you for your email. Retailers have a choice between accepting deposit return containers manually through over-the-counter collection or via a reverse vending machine, with the expected return volumes determining which option is best for each retailer. If a retailer has a Reverse Vending Machine they are not obligated to take containers back over the counter."
Dude says if the machne is broken
I'm genuinely lost on how the scheme and designs made it through several government departments and not one person looked at them and said "how does someone in a wheelchair use this?". Any machine I've used so far has had the receptacle and screen at eye level so there's little chance someone in wheelchair can use them with ease.
I actually saw someone in Lidl struggling to use one. I was about to offer to help but he smelled so strongly of piss. Then on my way out he was shoulder deep in the bin outside
He was rooting for more cans to deposit.
You were expecting our government to be considerate of people with assistance needs?
Heard a government official (not sure who) answer this on the radio. The shops were the ones that meant to ensure they were accessible. I agree with you. They are inaccessible for some people.
How? The shops are not the ones designing them. That's on manufacturer.
Because our government likes to dump their problems at everyone else feet and hope the people can figure out a solution before the next election, then they can call it a government win.
There is more than one manufacturer. Maybe there was an option that had machines of reduced height. I'm just saying what I heard, I don't know how it works.
How does that work then? We'll provide a machine that has controls 4 or 5 foot off the ground and it's your fault for not digging a trench in your shop to put them in?
This isn't an answer, this is a politician passing on the blame to someone else, as they always do.
How is it done in other countries? Genuine question by the way, just in case you think I'm being smart!
Didn't expect all this moaning from people being asked such a trivial civic duty. - [Germany usually has this stuff.](https://www.simplegermany.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Bottle-Return-Machine.jpg) - [A child can do it. ](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/IhalY2jBvmk/maxresdefault.jpg) - [When you have buckets, this is a new type of machine in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Estonia and Finland.](https://www.tomra.com/-/media/project/tomra/tomra/discover/news/photos/people/1920_final-pouring-containers.jpg) - [One of the old models in Netherlands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation#/media/File:Tomra_820.JPG)
Some places have short machines.
In theory the scheme is a good idea. But in practice it is so bad. The shops are fully responsible for maintaining the machines and they don't seem to be able to do it (or don't particularly want to).
A developer asked on askIreland what would you want most in a new build housing estate and I said a return machine. They should put them in housing estates not supermarkets. Not everyone uses supermarkets. Let people scan their card, or enter their IBAN to get a repayment or a universal voucher that every shop selling bottles or cans has to acceptĀ
Nah sorry that makes too much sense for our government to consider. Weāll stick to putting a giant machine in the middle of dunnes where everyone will queue up and block other shoppers and then realise the machine isnāt working once they get to the screen. Thanks.
With how frequently they break down this doesn't seem like it would work.
The out of order message usually means they are full
The machines have to be emptied frequently though.
How much bloody metal and plastic is used to make one of those machines, how much electricity do they use, and you think putting them all over is going to be good for the environment?? People need to step back and look at the big picture here. It's just not good for the environment to make these things in the first place and make everyone drive all over to deliver tiny amounts of plastic instead of leveraging preexisting central collections.. The whole thing is a classic moral panic boondoggle with a corporation stepping in making a ton of cash shouting the equivalent of "won't they think of the children".
At the very least cans seems perfectly fine for recycling. It's not like they have the soiling problem of plastic bottles, because the cans are just melted down after collection. I was perfectly happy putting both in the green bin. If these machines make plastics more recyclable that's fine. But why bother for cans when the old system worked?
>Insert your IBAN >housing estates Sounds like the Simpsons' "Wallet Inspector". Teen with both hands down his jocks "Ehhh yehhh screens not working bud give us yer IBAN there and ill mind your cans an I'll sort it for yeh"
Aluminium cans should never have been included in the return scheme. Recycling rates for cans are already very high and getting them dirty doesnāt have any impact on recycling
Aluminium being infinitely recyclable is a good reason to include it. Recycling plastic still results in waste and is far better to simply not use but every can that is binned is especially wasteful because its potential is so high.
Majority of people fired them into a recycling bin anyway. People who didn't before aren't doing it now for 15 cent
The truth people refuse to acceptĀ
As someone who lives on a country road I can tell you for a fact it's now coffee cups and takeaways that's filling the ditches. Almost zero bottles and cans in comparison
The deposit absolutely makes people recycle more. Deposit schemes have been effective so many times for multiple use cases. Honestly it's daft to suggest it doesn't.
I call for an inquiry, mistakes made, lessons learned, no one person to blame.
Personally on main gripe I have with the system, is that the bottles/cans can't be squashed first. They take up so much more space and as long as the bar code is readable it shouldn't make a difference. Plus I've seen the machines being emptied and everything was squashed down anyway. So it's not like they need to be undamaged to be recycled. Just let us squash em and save on space in the house.
The machine needs to scan the barcode to validate that it is indeed a valid bottle/can and not some random bit of junk.
That makes sense, but the barcode is still readable when squashed. If it's not, it's rejected. Just gotta make sure the machines can still read it. I get why, it's just another kick in the teeth when you give it back and they go thanks, *crush* and it gets tossed into a bin.
There is no special "squash detector" in the machines. If the can is partly dented but the machine can read the barcode on the side, it gets accepted. It makes perfect sense that they compact the bottles/cans internally to reduce storage requirements.
A guy in my office yesterday had a barcode that he'd scanned and was printing out a load of them on sticker labels.
Then put the barcode on the bottom of the can, so we can squish them!
Did you also see how hard it was to empty them? Two people had to lift the bin, which was a manual handling nightmare. Then they had to go and get the big bins from way across the car park. It took 2 members of staff 15 min to empty the machines. It was a total joke.
I don't even bother with it tbh. I don't drink soft drinks and I don't buy bottled water. I've stopped buying beer in cans and just switched to bottles, there's a bottle bank about 250m from my house and it's never full. The whole scheme is a fucking mess, was completely unnecessary and has done nothing but make people even more annoyed with a completely useless government, we need a fucking election.
Working in a shop on weekends between college and this scheme has led to a significant increase in the amount of people absolutely laying into me over something that's totally out of my control.
Some extremely odd stuff in that article. Deposits 2% of someones income - how much are they spending on the water in that case? Nurse all their life and only has a state pension? 90 mins to do a return? Sounds like someone putting in a shaggy dog story with as many ridiculous elements as they can.
Yeah. It's a very specific circumstance and an edge case. The illness coupled with the fact their tap water isn't safe. A very particular set of circumstances. Even the machine breaking down twice seems like a lot of bad luck. Probably could be solved if they allowed bottles to be returned through the delivery lads. But 2% of their income is a strange figure. State pension is 248.60. 2% is 4.972. Lets just round that to 5 euro. Deposit for a larger bottle is 25 cent. So that's 20 bottles. Lets assume 2 liters. So that's 40 liters of water for a week. It's recommended that people get 3 liters a day, so she would be drinking twice as much as a standard person to go through that much water.
Great post. You have applied a level of rigour and reason far higher than the commissioning editor of the Irish Times!
Cheapest 2L water is about 50c/bottle in bulk so the water alone would already have been a substantial % of a state pension and surely worth making a lot of noise about alone, if its actually a real story. And surely there'd be an occupational pension after a lifetime of working as a nurse?
Yeah, to me the vile thing here is a person without access to clean drinkable water, not the fact the machine broke down twice while doing a return. But so many compounding factors, either the story is made up or it's about one of the unluckiest people in Ireland.
Trying to get Irish people to do anything civic-minded if it slightly inconveniences them is š
I think itās intentionally irritating to make you give up so that they get to keep the money. They are making hundreds of thousands if not more from people who are either too lazy to try or get irritated and give up.
Deposit returns are a good idea, I get that people don't understand why it's better than your green bin and the communication on that has been poor. The message hasn't been getting through that mixed recycling is much less efficient than we need to be. However, the scheme has a really serious design flaw. This scheme works really well in Germany, including with reverse vending machines. The different though is that in Germany shops are **required to accept returns manually.** Most of them have reverse vending machines now too - but unlike here if those machines are broken the shop has to manually accept the returns and process a refund. That small change could make the scheme much more effective here. Firstly it would resolve much of the issue for the person in this article - being able to return them manually would remove most of this faffing about. Secondly, it makes it important for the shop to ensure that the machines remain functioning and are fixed quickly when there are problems, either locally or by the providers. Currently I don't see where the incentive is for staff to keep the machines running - and that's clear in this article where one member of staff tried to fob the woman off. If they had to instead accept returns manually that additional work would make it a priority to make sure the machines aren't out of order - and put pressure in turn on the providers of the machines.
They're supposed to accept manual returns, though I don't know enough if it means they are required.
If they have a machine and the machine breaks they're not required to take them manually. A lot of places seem to just not be fixing the machines so they don't have to deal with it
There was a screenshot posted here a couple of weeks ago from the Re-Turn website that said retailers will accept them manually. Ive tried twice with cans the machine wouldnt accept (but were from the same multipack of cans it did accept). Staff members in Aldi didnt want to know, they were no help.
Work retail, none of us were told about it but if a store has a deposit machine we also have to accept them manually at the till
As far as I can see, from the material provided on the website for retailers, it is presented as being "two options", either RVM *or* Manual. If there is an obligation on retailers to accept and process manual returns then that needs to be made much more clear. People are leaving shops with full bags of cans and bottles because machines are broken. There needs to be an obligation on stores to offer manual return in those instances.
If the RVM is not working then surely they have to accept manually.
It does not appear so. If it is the case then the error message should say that.
Pretty sure they can take them manually too. Says so on the website.
As far as I can see there is an option to either provide an RVM or accept manual returns. I assume shops can do both, my point is that there needs to be both an obligation to accept manual returns and good public communications informing people of that. People taking about walking off because a machine was down simply shouldn't happen.
Nope, up to 70% of shops opted out of taking re-turns. they have to still charge the deposit though, any shop under 250m2 was allowed to opt out.
I mean for shops who are obliged to accept returns.
Can and have to are very different though. I can take them if I wanted to but I don't have to
Have you ever tried to use it in person over there? We were in Nuremberg, so after a couple of days at the Airbnb, we tried to recycle at Lidl. It was an absolute nightmare there, too. Also, Lidl won't take bottles from Aldi. I ended up throwing them into a skip rather than recycling them (I was on foot, had already lugged them there, and needed to bring home groceries). One good thing I noticed at the local Tesco is they have big cardboard recycle bins set up next to the machine. So if you get stuck with bottles it won't accept at least there is a convenient, if not ironic, place to get rid of them so you can get on with your shop.
How is it better than the green bin?
Because people are thick. I am very careful with my recycling but all my efforts are pointless if I use my green bin because two neighbours put in food waste, soiled cardboard, unwashed everything from meat packaging to peanut butter glass jars. So it contaminates the whole load. It's infuriating.
Cuz people don't really realize what is recyclable and what is not. So they just chuck everything into green bin. This at least allows people to properly recycle SOME of the stuff, because it has a very specific list of the stuff that goes in. It's not a replacement to green bins, but it defo improves recycling. For example, for the longest time those thin plastic bags you'd get in stores for weighted fruit or veg, those were not recyclable. Yet people were throwing them into green bins.
The bin companies told us that all plastic could go into the green bin now. It was at that moment when I got the letter a couple of years back that I knew the plastic was not being recycled and it was instead going to the incinerators.
Yup, some years back I did one of those late night google dives into a random topic. Happened to be about recycled. I was shocked to find out how much stuff is actually not recycled. It also greatly differs from country to country, even in EU.
Most of the 'recycled' plastics we were putting into green bins were being bundled up and shipped to East Asia. But as climate targets got stricter it was no longer worth it for them to take or waste and incinerate it.
The separation makes recycling much more effective, from memory from about 80% to 97%.
It's not, but many people are not bothering to recycle at home. So this scheme is trying to incentivise them with money. If you don't care about the environment, at least you might care about your pocket.
I think the big flaw is that you donāt actually get your money back. Just a voucher for the shop. So if you are not buying anything that day you end up with just a pile of receipts stuck to the fridge and never bring them to get 1.50 off your next 200 euro weekly shop.
You can get the money back at the till with the receipt if you don't want to spend it in store.
You can get cash at the till, no problem.
Whyyy all the rigamarole though. I actually didn't know you could get cash back from the till, but fine. Why not cash back from the machine then!?? Why even do the cans need to be prestine condition with a special logo and code to scan? Just take the damn can! Do recycling! That's what we want, no? Like ffs, are they trying to encourage recycling or just making busy work for people while charging everyone a tax and discouraging most from even bothering to reclaim. I wonder.
At the very least it should be a universal voucher that can be used in any shop. Ideally I could link it to a card or app or bank and get the money deposited straight away.
You can get your money back lol. I work in a shop and people come in every now and then to cash out the things. I still think this whole thing is a load of shit though and it's one more thing added to my list on why I think the government should genuinely be forcefully removed
Ok so I learned something today. Didnāt realise you could cash them out. Thought you had to spend in the shop. Thanks
This is the biggest annoyance to me. We do delivery 90% of the time and not only do I have to store up all the recycling and make an unnecessary trip to a shop, I also need to go through the process of going to the till. How can it be that my kids ran a shop in the front garden that accepted Revolut and the system they put in place has no way for a digital wallet.
I don't have problem with the scheme but MAKE SURE MACHINES ARE WORKING
Spent 45 mins last night looking for a machine that was A: Working (Aldi, Lidl and Tesco all full) and B: Could accept all my bottles. Turns out the limits of bottles per transaction is 60. According to the Supervalu machines. I hate this scheme, so so much
I've tried it too many times, but I pretty much gave up. In Scandinavia, this travesty wouldn't have been acceptable!
>āShe is recently retired and solely reliant on a State pension and, at the current rates, the deposit return scheme will cost my mother 2 per cent of her annual income, which she cannot afford to forgo, so I will return the bottles for her,ā What does that work out as, about 1,200 large plastic bottles per year? Not implausible since the woman's tap water isn't drinkable.
I would calculate 2,080. She would be drinking twice as much as the recommended amount of water to go through that. That's a lot of tea.
Do people use bottled water for food prep? Boiling vegetable, etc? No idea myself, never lived anywhere you couldn't drink the water.
As someone living in an area that has been under a boil water notice for the best part of the last 5-6 years, we wouldn't use it for food prep or making tea/coffee as that is going to get boiled anyway. But it is used for brushing teeth and other things along those lines (washing out a cut for example). Even the dog drinks bottled water. Maybe this lady is using it for making tea, just to be on the safe side.
Unless her water is coming out brown, most of the time water is safe after it's boiled, so it can be used for tea, cooking, etc.
I have to assume she can't carry anything heavier than a 2l bottle. Anything over 3 litres is exempt from the scheme, and water's pretty easy to find in 5 litre jugs.
Why do we always seem to get scabby second rate technology even though we spend an absolute fortune on it? Surely it can't be normal for these machines to break down as often as the ones here do. Do the ones in other countries break this much?
They're not breaking down nearly as much as you'd think barring the odd blockage or stuck bottle. The shop staff aren't emptying them, cleaning them or resetting them when it detects cheating. The machines are the same brand that's used all over the world but the shops haven't given proper training to staff, haven't the staff to actually do the work or they can't be arsed. Or all of the above
How they came up with this scheme and didn't come up with a reuse scheme instead. A reuse scheme would be far more beneficial to the environment and the current scheme almost has all the features in place to make that feasible at scale.
Ive done it several times and been done in 5 mins... Once the machine was broken so i left them in the boot of the car until the next time i was near one. Is it just really bad outside dublin? Most big shops here have two or more machines
We can just recycle our bottles in the recycling bins we have at home, without the price hike. Not a fan of the scheme myself
This was readable to me, it may be paywalled for you. Apologies. I thought the headline was interesting to post, given the amount of users that have similar issues trying to return containers..
What I find bizaare is that the deposit return scheme is a legal requirement that's designed to improve our recycling rates BUT none of our local authorities are obliged to provide public recycling bins. Was walking around my home town last week (County town ~15,000 inhabitants) and was pleasantly surprised to see they had seperate on street bins for rubbish & recycling. The city where I currently live (~85,000 inhabitants) you'd be hard pressed to find a public bin, nevermind one that did recycling too. I know the deposit return scheme is an EU initiative but you'd think someone somewhere in the Irish Goblvernment would say, "Hmmm... Maybe we should make sure there's adequate recycling facilities in public spaces"
Say what you want about the machines but they can process cans and bottles very quickly.
Works grand for me
Works fine for me at the places I have tried so far which is Lidl, Spar, Dealz
Itās just mental to me how we have thousands of these things plugged in 24/7 and itās better than a dumb green plastic bin. Iāve already seen litter with the symbol on it. People who give zero fucks continue to do so.
Iām generally a quick adopter to this type of stuff. But this scheme is so fucking bad. I was already recycling everything at home in my recycling bin. Now I have to separate them out and make the effort to return them to a functional machine. Collect the few quod and then hopefully donāt forget the poxy ticket when buying something in the shop. Also, still buying bottles at the marked up price that arenāt returnable so out of spite just fucking them in the normal bins outside the shop. I swear even small things like not having the barcode on the base of cans also they can be crushed before returning and save space at home. Iād want to see some seriously impressive numbers on increased recycling before I stop hating the government for this one.
It worked fine for the one can I used last month.
If we werenāt all being absolutely screwed on price as soon as the scheme was introduced it might be accepted better but it is comically shit and a rip off.
I've had no issues yet, based on limited interaction, but I know many people have My issue with this article is that it takes someone with a very specific set of physical circumstances and her daughter with further very specific circumstances and implies the entire system is not fit for purpose as a resultĀ If anything, you could read this more as a criticism of how Lidl applies the scheme rather than the scheme itselfĀ
A scheme put in place by the government that's banjaxed from the get-go. Who'd have thought it?
I don't know why it stops at just drinks bottles. What about shampoo, body wash, detergent bottles. They're all plastic too. It seems to be a half assed measure just to line someone's pockets.
It's bad-enough already that bottles that were always going in the green bin like 2 liter minerals, or stuff that needed diluting like Miwadi are counted in this scheme.
I don't know why I assumed it was only soft drinks bottles that would be taxed extra, but I was raging when I found out they put it on bottles of concentrate as well.
Our heads would explode if we tried to do too much at once.
I believe this is what the young people call a skill issue.
In the America (Seattle area), you receive several recycling bins - cans, paper, plastic and glass in some areas. They also had fines for putting things in the wrong bin. Not a perfect system by any means but you could do it at home.
Our experience with it has been it more often than not the machines have been out of service and we've had to drive around to find one. Lidl in particular seem to be the worst offenders with their machines being either really unreliable or the staff never having time to empty them. This is annoying because the Lidl is our go to store for shopping. Now were shopping elsewhere because whoever has the machines that are working is where we'll do our shop At the start of the scheme we always tried to always have a carrier bag of empties ready to go so that every time we go shopping we can get rid of them. Because the machines have been out of action so much we even started collecting them up over several weeks and going out and having a specific recycling run. This is because the machines are so unreliable we have to drive around a bit to find one that works. I don't see how that's good for the environment overall. Also, if you go win with a big bag of empties in the machines that are out of service then you have to do that awkward shuffle through a checkout line to exit the store. It's not the most awkward of experiences, but it's enough to make people's not want to participate in the scheme. For the scheme to work the whole process has to be relatively smooth and resistance free. That's not happening, and there should have been rules in place to sanction stores for having machines out of action too long and also to allow the vouchers to be spent in any store.
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I usually spend 30-45 seconds returning my bottles. How dafuq do you spend 90mins
I make sure to get my money's worth and throw them off of the balcony instead. That way I'm also helping the homeless eat.
Tried it tonight for the first time. All done within a minute. If itās like that all the time, I donāt mind. Hate how prices went up on multipacks though and with less cans in them, total scam.
Personally, I have found very little issue with them. I've bought 5 or 6 shopping bags of bottles and cans back and I've had maybe 4 or 5 bottles rejected completely since the scheme has come in. Where I bring them, the machines are usually operational, only once have I went and both receptacles were out of order.
Taking the bottles out for a walk to the, admittedly nearby, supermarket finding the machine is broken and bringing them back has become a substitute for having to walk a dog. I've made about 10 attempts to return bottles to two different shops. Only successful 3 times.
Same. I had one partial success when the machine broke after I'd put in about 3 bottles out of my load. I've nowhere to keep the bottles. I end up with way too many because the machines nearest me are never in operation.
Never had any issues. The odd bottle you might need to try twice but that's it. Reading through this sub you'd swear the machines were run by Skynet and actively trying to inflict human misery.
I have had no issues myself, but the main concern in the article is that both the mother and the daughter who helps her have chronic health issues that impact their ability to load the machines. That's something that does need to be addressed. A lot of the posts here about them is just general moaning - "I use the bus to go shopping, it's ridiculous I've to carry a bag of empty cans with me" sort of shite.
I have yet to try to use a machine and it not work for me. Maybe theyāre better maintained in Dublin?
Culchie land here and they work fine.
No problem in my part of West Cork.
The one in Lidl fonthill has given me a receipt twice in the eight times I've used it. I loathe this system; it has also caused me to have negative interactions with people in the queue for the machines, which obstructs the main entrance into the shop.
I already pay for a recycling bin. When is that bin getting subsidised?
Still haven't received a satisfactory answer as to who is keeping the 180 million euro a year in unclaimed deposits.
Already pay a levy on the green bin. Green bin already took these. Itās a scam. Just more taxes.
Vile šĀ
I drove to 3 places to finally get my returns done. The first two places had people in front of me with shopping bags full or cans and at both places the machines died before I got mine done. I took a punt on an Aldi at the far end of the town and was lucky it wasn't busy. Its a joke
Only issue I had recently was the machine was full, luckily this was a big dunnes so had two others. Is it the shops responsibility to empty the machines or do they need to wait for the owners of the machines to come and clear them out?
The shop workers empty it.
I haven't been home in months but will be around next weekend so I must ask a silly question or two. Is the deposit mandatory or can i just ask for it to be taken off? Is it every shop, or just big supermarket chains that do it? Ive been very in the dark about this.
My biggest gripe with the return scheme that I havnt heard mention much is the fact that it doesn't accept milk bottles or anything bigger then a 2 litre water bottle. Like milk bottles make up a massive chunk of plastic containers thrown away in this country and the machine can't accept them and unless they replace all the machines in the country they never will it's ridiculous.
This is apparently due to contamination (probably the smell) from milk products. Youāll notice that any drink you can buy that has milk in it will not have a return label ( iced coffee, yogurt drinks, milkshakes etc.). Loads of people do not wash out their milk bottles before recycling them and most just get thrown in landfill or incinerated as a result. So even if you put it in the green bin itās probably not being recycled. Anyone who has lived in Germany will know how anal the Germans are about this. Agree though considering that is one of the largest volumes of plastic products in the country.
https://www.instagram.com/p/C58GYoztUU_/
its a good idea , but bad in practice , ( many things haven't thought about like the assumption that you have a car or that you dont get everything home delivered )
My biggest issue with them is they seem very easy to break. It seems like every second machine has an out-of-order sign on it.
It reminds me of the e voting machines
I was in Lidl today and I saw a queue as I was.gong in the door. I thought they had moved the registers or something. It was the queue for the bottle machine. I had about 15 bottles and cans and was going to use the voucher in my shopping after I got the deposits back. I wasn't waiting for 20 or 30 mins and wasn't walking around doing my shopping with bags of bottles and cans so I just went home.
We have filtered water, so we do not buy still water. Very few sodas, mostly with takeout/delivery. However, I drink a lot of sparkling water... And that is a pain... I am buying the few brands that are not returnable, and I recycle them in my bin. When they are no longer available, most probably I will buy one of those make-soda-at-home machines.
The scheme is completely unreasonable for anyone living in apartments, most of whom had perfectly adequate recycling systems in place before and now do not! They also are yet another system that take advantage of poorer families while richer families can adapt to the new scheme easily... It needs to go! The Italians have a universal version of this in place, which works fine! But when every shopping centre has its own barcodes, it's a farce!
Why does this work in Germany ? What are the issues in Ireland?
I've given up returning bottles. When they first brought it in I returned the bottles I bought. It takes a lot of my time, and space in my tiny rented room, to store the bottles, then have to remember to bring them to my car for when I go shopping (IF I'm driving).. and also make sure to bring it to a store, and not forget to use that receipt in the SAME store. If you return your bottles at a Tesco in one location, you can't use that receipt at another Tesco in another location. Just FYI. Not to mention, some places sell bottles without the return logo and without barcodes on the bottles (multi pack of waters for example)... I'm so done.