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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Why is this unsustainable? You would still have to pay for the drink and deposit before you get the deposit back.

For one, it would increase the attractiveness of fraud where the same bottle is sold in multiple jurisdictions with different deposit rates. Instead of collecting trash across the border, buy cans there by the truckload, bring them back across state lines, empty them and redeem them for the "deposit" you never paid.

Of course, there are some plausible technological or political solutions to this. But it does change the economics.

Isn't arbitrage like that just how markets are supposed to work? Still ends up with the cans redeemed and disposed, just goes about it in such a way that the maximum amount of value is extracted from them.

No. This is almost the opposite of a market-based system. Aluminium cans are artificially made available only at tens or hundreds of times their cost to produce.

> Aluminium cans are artificially made available only at tens or hundreds of times their cost to produce.

You forgot externalized costs... add the cost of cleaning up after irresponsible people leaving behind their cans wherever they want or the added costs and pollution of making a can from fresh aluminium ore (bauxite), and suddenly that "ten or hundred times" becomes "at cost".

Deposits are a regulatory way to account for externalized costs, at least to a bit.

The deposit has nothing to do with the dirtiness of mining. It's so that people like you don't see a can blowing in the wind.

If it were about the mining the deposit would be on everything else made of aluminum too.

Of all the things to let into the environment aluminum is one of the least worst. As with everything else, it's yet another story about how narratives, marketing, knee jerk reactions and bike shedding are the name of the game when it comes to public policy.

…which is easy enough to fix with bar codes.

This is how it works in Germany. You pay a deposit on every bottle. To get your money back requires a machine to recognise each bottle/can as legitimate, based on the bar code.

Now, yes, people could print stickers with fake bar codes on… but I don’t think that would work well at the scale of the major fraud operation you’re envisaging…

And the German system is a bit silly, too.

The Einwegpfand was supposed (I guess?) to make Einwegflaschen go away and promote Mehrwegflaschen.

As far as I can tell, retail outlets just got good at crushing Einwegflaschen. An investment in capability that benefitted basically no one.

> An investment in capability that benefitted basically no one.

There is a benefit: You rarely find plastic bottles and beer cans in the environment any more.

Really? I live in Hamburg, Germany. The amount of broken glass bottles is amazing...

I lived in Hamburg for almost 30 years, but the city was never dirtier than it is right now.

I imagine the part of the problem is that once the bottle is broken, or the barcode is damaged, there is no incentive to return it anymore.

Same in Berlin, I had to replace my bike's tires more than once.

Replying to sibling comment: The incentive is to not break the bottle, but return it instead.

Do they use a different bar code on bottles sold in Germany to those sold by the same producer in bordering countries? That's something American producers generally don't do for different states (yet?) - they use the same label and write the relevant deposit amount for every state on the bottle.

From my experience of Denmark -> Finland, yes.

There’s a beer I like that’s cheaper and easier to order direct from the Danish brewery than buy from the alcohol monopoly in Finland. The cans look identical. Of course I tried putting them in the return machine, but it would not credit them (although they’ll still take them in for recycling)

People also buy huge quantities of beer personally from Estonia (2 hr boat ride, nice day trip) and the system would probably collapse in a day if they paid for cans from anywhere.

I crush any that I know won’t give money before putting them with the household metal recycling collection as I don’t want some poor soul wasting their time fishing them out and returning them.

In Sweden, and probably most of Europe as far as I would guess, the European/International Article Number [1] barcode system is used. It encodes the country first, so yes.

You cannot get cash from foreign cans or PET bottles, since the deposit was not paid here.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Article_Number

The EAN definitely doesn't indicate the country where the product was sold. In your Swedish supermarket, I expect you'll find plenty of products with Danish or German EANs (certainly that's the case in Ireland).

As your linked article says, "The first three digits of the EAN-13 (GS1 Prefix) usually identify the GS1 Member Organization which the manufacturer has joined (not necessarily where the product is actually made)"

Yes, they are different between Germany and Austria, which otherwise share labeling for everything - the water and juice bottles I bought while skiing in Austria were rejected for return when I got home to Germany, despite being from brands also widely sold here.

I live in Finland, it has this system, the UK where I’m from does not, you just squash your cans and bottles into a weekly recycling collection.

It’s the ‘squash’ bit that I miss and makes me hate the deposit system. You have to keep the cans all fully intact, so the machine can read the barcode, so you have to give up stacks of room in your house and carry an awkward big bag of mostly air around to return them.

Do you know if they need the cans in their original shape in order to recycle them? If it's just to keep the barcode intact, presumably it could be printed on the can's base instead.

That’s one of the best ideas I’ve heard in a while.

You sort of have to lay the can sideways on a belt and it spins it around before scanning the barcode, then it carries it to the appropriate bin internally (where it gets crushed). In my opinion it’s a waste of time, the machines are sticky and smelly and I feel sorry for the staff who have to go and un-jam them regularly, but on the upside you won’t see any littering around the place (well, in summer you will - it’s socially acceptable just to toss them on the ground but someone will be along to pick it up within minutes)

After the can gets accepted by the machine it gets crushed and sold in bulk to a 3rd party. That 3rd party is buying and selling by weigh and is usually the one who's usually getting the government check. So all barcodes do is reduce casual fraud. The pros are already injecting it higher up the supply chain.

> it would increase the attractiveness of fraud where the same bottle is sold in multiple jurisdictions with different deposit rates.

Doesn't matter which way you slice it, it doesn't pay. The exception is if you can ship it on Mothers's Day.

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