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Comment by siedes | Hacker News Reader

A small deposit is no incentive. Now if it were a significant amount like $.50-$1.00 per bottle you recycle, then you'd have people literally racing to get those bottles. Then just increase the price on the drinks itself by a bit to make up for that, which is also a disincentive to discourage a number of people from buying them in the first place.

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oregon has 90% redemption rate[1] at 10 cents per bottle, so there is obviously some incentive.

1. https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-bottle-deposit-redem...

I don't think this is the whole story, since as far as I'm aware the only people who get the redemption are people who put very low value on their time because it's inconvenient to actually redeem bottles.

"Pant"[0] is very common across most of northern europe- what you tend to find is that people will pilfer public trash cans to get bottles and cans to dispense, in Sweden where I live it's 1kr (or 10c in USD) for a can or small bottle, and large bottles being 2kr.

Not everyone is so fortunate to have gainful employment, especially not as gainful as the normal user of this site.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation

If it’s a deposit, then pilfering trash cans isn’t really a problem.

Same here in Helsinki, Finland. People will root around rubbish-bins, and collect the cans/bottles. (Especially in parks, and next to tram-stops. Basically places where people are likely to have had a drink and not recycled themselves.)

How is it inconvenient? I have a bag where I drop all my cans and bottles, when I go shopping I take it with me. Every supermarket takes them regardless of where they came from. No extra trips or detours required.

Incentive for who though? For the homeless and very poor, who probably will not even be the ones purchasing those bottles(at least at the same rate as those in higher economic classes) in the first place? We need to make it worth it for the good number of consumers who buy these things, so that they don't litter in the first place and put more thought about those $0.50-$1.00 per bottle they're tossing out. Yes, this may make it so that less bottles are available for the homeless/impoverished, but I think we should be doing way more for them than giving them the scraps that are 10 cent bottles...

It’s a psychological effect. Same reason why Whole Foods charged $0.25 to get a cart, and then returned you the money. People tend to return the carts after paying the money.

Maybe I’m a weirdo, but as long as I can remember, my family holds on to bottles and returns them to the market every couple of weeks.

Littering is a douche thing to do. There should be some social stigma attached to it.

a little more than that - oregon has bags that can be returned full without counting and left in a secured room to have the money deposited to an account a few days later. given that these are typically at grocery stores and several of them add on a redemption percentage (fred meyer adds 20% for in-store credit use), the number of non-homeless making returns is high.

The UK introduced a carrier bag charge scheme. Overnight usage dropped 80%, and that was for a 5p charge. Now I don't think many people would stop to pick up 5p off the street, but people will jump through the hoops to avoid paying the 5p. These things work, even at a relatively low threshold. Don't forget you're only aim to nudge what people know they should already be doing.

https://www.standard.co.uk/futurelondon/theplasticfreeprojec...

I highly doubt the 10 cents per bottle is the exclusive reason--I wish that article talked more about it. The $0.10 could pay for the other reasons, but I think it's equally about infrastructure and culture as it is about cost.

Culturally, people are only willing to put up with so much. There's a Penn and Teller BS clip where he has like 10 unique recycling bins and is explaining sorting to them. I've been to towns where you have to haul all of your trash out, but at Disney they found that people aren't willing to carry trash more than 30ft.

I feel like I do more than most. I set aside batteries, and hoard the few single use bags I use. I drove to a Best Buy because I saw they had battery recycling, but when I arrived they excluded alkalines. I'm honestly not sure which plastics my curb-side accepts. I know that's what the number in the logo is for, but I have trouble finding it and I'm not sure what's accepted. I wish there was a simpler system, like the plastics were dyed blue, had a blue stripe, or something distinguishing.

Is their program successful because of the $0.10 redemption? Or is it because they have a lot of redemption centers? No city I've lived in honor redemptions for curb-side, which is often a large percentage.

> I highly doubt the 10 cents per bottle is the exclusive reason--I wish that article talked more about it. The $0.10 could pay for the other reasons, but I think it's equally about infrastructure and culture as it is about cost.

i believe you are correct. note my response to another poster about returning bottles and cans here in oregon.

It's actually a problem at the moment. After the raise to $0.10 deposit, some people started hauling bottles over from Washington. The way the program is funded depends on less than 100% of bottles being returned.

We need something national. And just bottles isn't going to cover it - single use plastic products are cheap enough, and companies have no incentive not to use them, so of course everyone else ends up dealing with them.

Australia has it per state and they have the refund logo printed on the bottle label. Bringing bottles from another state will result in a fine if caught.

In the US machines simply won’t pay for bottles purchased out of state. That’s my experience in Michigan, anyway.

For the vast majority of bottles that's not a problem surely.

Edit: same here in Norway, Swedish and Danish bottles are not redeemable here but it is definitely not a big enough problem to matter.

Not saying it’s a problem. It is that way to prevent people from buying bottles in Indiana, not paying the deposit, and driving to Michigan to get 10c a bottle.

The return rate is still less than 100% though?

Ultimately 100% of deposits were collected, the aim should be to pay out 100% again. That's the aim, that's what success looks like. Now I have no idea how these systems are usually funded, and this probably is quite usual. But you can't complain when your system does what its supposed to. When the return rate reaches 100% then you can celebrate success and start complaining about imports.

Small deposits certainly add up. Here in Helsinki you pay 0.15 - 0.50 extra when you buy bottled/canned drinks, and you can return the empty containers to pretty much any shop to get your cash.

There are homeless people who survive on the income from collecting bottles in the city-center, in parks, and even from rubbish-bins. It's not unusual to see a small group of people with large plastic-bags containing hundreds of empty cans/bottles.

In California they have CRV, which is a kinda significant recycling amount.

However it doesn’t stop people throwing away plastic stuff. What it _does_ do, is create a job for the army of homeless people to go around collecting bottles so they can claim that sweet cashback.

It’s effectively a very strange way of employing people at far below minimum wage to keep the streets clean. Very odd.

The issue with that is it would be cheaper to produce counterfeit bottles, breaking the entire system

Oh but we could put each one on the blockchain!

pffttt... assign each one an ipv6 address.

You jest, but that's not far from a good idea. You obviously don't need a blockchain, but you could do something like printing a UID on each bottle and scanning them before giving the refunds.

You are right it was in jest. I stopped short of the colacrypto coin. But your idea sounds good too just some scan and each bottle can be accounted for and at the end of the year have some idea how many make it to recycling.

That’s why you’d have to police it and punish wrongdoers. Good can’t be the enemy of perfect.

Most of Australia has 10c deposits on plastic bottles. You virtually never see them laying around outside. Its fairly common to see homeless people walking around with bags full of bottles they found in public bins or on the street.

We also have a 10c charge on plastic bags at supermarkets and you rarely see those floating around anymore and people use them multiple times now.

Coffee cups and fast food boxes are all over the side of the street unfortunately.

Its amazing what a massive difference such a tiny fee can make.

Both those measures have almost halved overall street litter in NSW https://returnandearn.org.au/exc_news/a-billion-reasons-to-c...

From first hand experience, you're wrong.

I had a real littering problem around an area I used to live in, council installed a recycling station that people could bring bottles to for a cash reward (10c a bottle).

It worked. Not only did people stop throwing the bottles on the ground as much, we had people driving around the area trying to find discarded plastic bottles, and there was a noticeable improvement on the amount of discarded bottles around the area within months.

The only real problem was people rifling through recycling bins trying to make a buck.

In Oregon there are homeless people who ride around in bikes with trailers collecting cans and bottles all day. A couple sacks full is worth $20.

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