Hacker News Reader

Comment by LordDragonfang | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about where you live, but in California, we have a "bottle deposit" on both glass bottles and aluminum cans (~$0.10 per item), which gets returned to you if you bring it to a recycling center. The only people I see actually bothering to sort and return these are very low income people and homeless people that go through public trash cans.

View on HN

In Denmark its 1-3kr, or 15-50¢, depending on the size and material of the container.

Plenty of cans are collected by homeless / lowest income people, but it's also just about enough that average people will collect them too.

If I have a huge bag after a party, I return them. When I normally only have 0-2 bottles in a typical week, I take them outside and put them on the little shelf on the bin for someone to collect without needing to rummage: https://www.magasinetkbh.dk/sites/default/files/public/style...

New food packaging can only use recycled material collected in this way. The general household recycling is considered too dirty.

This mirrors my experience in Germany. We would often save up a dozen or so bottles and bring them all to the grocery store where they could be returned. If we had a beer on the way to the bars we would typically just set the empty next to a garbage bin for someone to collect and return.

NYC is the same, but the way refuse is handled makes it more convenient for people to “harvest” it. I lived on the Upper East Side for a while, and building managers would bag up recycling in clear bags. Then you’d see people out collecting the bottles and cans out of the bag but also making sure to tidy up afterwards. The collection crews would have gigantic bags, carts, etc. that they’d take to larger grocery stores to turn in for the deposit.

Any benefits of this are effectively negated by emissions from VMT's driving to the recycling center.

That seems win/win, doesn't it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com