A Plea from German Brewers: Bring Back Your Empties | Hacker News Reader

A Plea from German Brewers: Bring Back Your Empties

nytimes.com

17 pointsmarban7 comments

This story gets repeated every year and it never is a problem. It’s the yearly marketing stunt to end up in the “Bild” our trash tabloid.

> To encourage more people to take back their bottles, Mr. Fritsche has toyed with the idea of nearly doubling the deposit that customers pay on their reusable beer bottles, to 15 cents. But larger brewers argue that increasing the deposit price is not the solution because they have too many bottles in circulation and that it would be a complicated process.

So, they're not serious. If they had a real shortage, they'd be thrilled to buy back bottles at effectively ~8 cents per bottle (the amount they'd 'overpay' for old bottles sold with the original deposit). Cheaper and easier to ask the public to work for free returning more bottles despite inflation.

I spent a bit of time delving into the Pfand (deposit) system for my immigrant readers, if you want to know how it works.

https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pfand-bottles

Some interesting facts:

- Returning bottles is a pain because it's hard to identify which bottles have Pfand, and which supermarkets will accept all of them.

- In Berlin, if you're drinking outside, just leave your empties by a bin and they'll get collected. If you drink in a large park, people will even walk around collecting them. People marvel at how efficiently it happens, but aren't blind to why it happens.

- Bottles from other states will be returned there. Each bottle type goes back somewhere. Sometimes the return distance alone can raise environmental concerns - I know someone who's studying this.

- The German's love for recycling is real. You might even find passive-aggressive notes in your apartment lobby aimed at "whoever does it wrong". Recycling is just very complicated: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/sorting-trash-in-germany

When making homebrew beer, the bottles are the most expensive component.

I think it's simply that all the other ingredients of beer are super cheap...

There is not a huge market for empty bottles (at retail) -- most people want the beer inside!

To me that was always the best part of homebrewing. The empty bottles were expensive enough that it was usually worthwhile to just find a brewery I liked that used nice thick bottles that can handle a few reuses and empty them myself.

Funny, I try to use returnable crates of bar bottles sold by supermarkets and it drives the cashiers nuts. The stores seem to be afraid to use bar/QR codes in the other direction for fear that they are used incorrectly.

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