| Comment | It comes with its own problems though. I lived in a country where this was in place. Homeless people would roam the streets looking for discarded can and bottles so they could get the deposit. Sad as it is that they needed to do that, it did help keep the place clean. The deposit is usually only paid back in the former of a ticket which takes that amount off your shopping in the shop you returned the cans and bottles to. This is only ever a big supermarket - no chance smaller shops would be able to do this on the scale required. The machines often don't work properly, and they're filthy. Operating this scheme during a pandemic would be very foolish due to the filth from people's cans and bottles. You'd have to change the kind of every single can and bottle, making them largely uniform. In the country I lived in, people tended to buy in bulk (20 pack cases of things, etc) incentivising them to recycle and making it easier. Most people here don't shop like that, so shopping habits would have to change. That being said, I hope we do manage to move towards such a scheme here, but I don't see it working in a million years. Oh, and before anyone mentions returning ginger bottles, yeah, that was great, but small time compared to the infrastructure and upheaval we'd need to make a proper returns system work in this day and age. |
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