SNP and Green ministers want to boost recycling rates by forcing buyers to pay an extra 20p deposit on single-use drinks containers, including cans and bottles, that would be refunded when returned.
However, the cost of that deposit will initially be met by the producer, who will have to add 20p onto every product before it is sold.
Every outlet that sells takeaway drinks will also be required to act as a return collection point, with automated “reverse vending machines” outside supermarkets, community centres and other public places.
Sure, stick the deposit on, that’ll increase collection rates. No problem with that.
But reverse vending machines at every outlet? Are these people fucking insane? Never heard of economies of scale?
You’ve already recruited every kid in the country into earning multiple 20ps. Why in buggery aren’t you having fewer machines at scale?
What would be the net environmental impact of such a policy? My guess is that SNP and Green zealots haven’t considered this at all.
What is the likelihood that convenience stores would simply give up on selling drink because they would lack the capacity to store and process lots of empties? How would VAT be treated? Would the deposit be VAT exempt and would the accounting software currently in use be up to the task?
OMG – Bring on the McLions.
If it’s Scotland only it’s another huge incentive to go shopping in England to buy beer without the deposit. Then people can stuff the empties into the stupid machines and get free money.
Hilariously, you have to return cans to the scheme undamaged to get the deposit back. The cans are then crushed.
@Martin
Here in Sweden we have an established returns system (the government has to subsidise it). The machine reads the barcode of the bottle/can so it knows which type of material it is. Coke bottles from Denmark are not recognised. I guess that the Scotish returnable bottles will have their own barcode to prevent none-deposit bottles being returned.
Of course that’s another change to the distribution system & yet more cost…
@Harry – again, here in SE the system just needs to be able to read the bar-code. Dents etc are fine.
Lidl in Clogland charge a deposit on beer bottles and have machines for returning crates full of bottles. Don’t put Amstel bottles in an Ottinger crate though, the machine won’t compute. …….
If anyone in Scotland wants to buy our waste at 5p a shot I know a few pubs and so on. We could freight it up. Call it 7p a unit delivered in bulk.
Let me know.
I guess that the Scotish returnable bottles will have their own barcode to prevent none-deposit bottles being returned.
Also hilariously, or predictably, the Scots Greens didn’t think of this either. So, if I’m a whole of UK producer, apply for my DRS bar code and just slap it in all of my products, obviously I will pay the deposit on the Scottish sold stuff but not for the rest of the UK. Those rUK empties could then be returned by individuals into the scheme, creating a thriving black market and bankrupting circularity Scotland. The whole shit show is one massively funny car crash.
In the UK councils have an obligation to collect household recycling. I’m not going to start standing in some Soviet style queue to hand the bottles back.
The chavs that throw bottles in the street will still do it. It’s other people’s money for them anyway.
Given the number of cans and bottles that get chucked into my hedgerows, I say bring it on. Its high time the public were forced to dispose of their shit correctly, and if it takes making them pay for the disposal up front and only get the money back when they do dispose of it correctly then so be it. I’m just about to do my annual spring litter pick along the small country road next to my farm, I’ll end up with at least half a dozen bags of litter from a a mile or two. And within days they’ll be more. The public are arseholes.
They do this in the Netherlands.
Buy a crate of beer, return the crate full of empty bottles. Machine lifts the bottles out, reads the bar codes, credits the deposit.
Bottles not sold from the stores are not credited.
Cans dropped into a chute, code read and credited.
I gave wondered for years why this is not done in the UK. “Not invented here”, perhaps?
Having a deposit on the bottle is great. It solves your hedgerow problem after all. Half a dozen bags would buy the booze for a cracker of a teenage party after all.
It’s the deployment of the machines that is the mistake.
Regarding the dumping of cans/bottles, you rarely see that in SE (lots of other trash though). There’s plenty of “low-income” people who go round collecting every bottle/can they can find – even going through bins to find them. Here a can or 500ml bottle is worth 1SEK (~10p) & a large bottle 2SEK (~20p). Considering the Scots reputation for penny-watching the same might happen there.
Same in Grossdeutschland. German and Austrian supermarkets have machines that take either crates or individual bottles ( pop and beer) and give the punter a receipt redeemable against further shopping.
There are always two prices quoted for crates : with and without empties.
It is a good idea and I remember getting a few pennies back on Corona bottles in the 1970s. But of course the SNP will somehow manage to bugger it up.
Doesnt stop >40% of beer bottles being in the wrong crates though.
“It’s the deployment of the machines that is the mistake.”
Not at all – nor are the members of the “Bottle Deposit Machine Manufacturer’s Lobbying Group” idiots 😉
(however, were there a button that could be pressed to prevent all those involved with this latest scam from being dropped into a bottomless pit, I doubt that I’d press it…)
Having a deposit on the bottle is great. It solves your hedgerow problem after all.
I’m not sure it would solve that. The incentive would work at scale, so rubbish at home would be worth collecting and returning. But one or two items whilst out and about? “Nah, just chuck ’em; so the thing was 20p more expensive, whatevs, I ain’t carrying it.” The army of kids would mostly only target built up areas; scale again.
The litter problem is cultural, not financial. Sadly, on the whole, we English are scum.
I get quite a lot of “McDonalds” garbage on my front garden in the summer and autumn, strangely shredded. I thought it was da local yoof and I was sort of right – it’s fox cubs bringing their scavengings back to a safe place to rummage through.
They have the hole in the wall machines in Denmark – certainly Copenhagen, but I don’t remember seeing them out in the sticks. Then again, I wasn’t looking.
Anyway, https://www.themaltmiller.co.uk/product-category/equipment/canning/ gives about £75-80 per 230 cans, or 35p per. 20p deposit per is 57% cost increase, for the micro-brewery type operation.
Like Otto, I can remember taking the lemonade bottles back to the newsagent as a kid. Then bottle banks (and paper) dotted around town centres (mainly car parks), then household, kerb-side pick up.
North Ayrshire Council have kerb-side pick up for recycling. So, same as in England. A set of councils in Sussex signed a single ten year deal with Kier in 2012, touted to save £30m over the term. They exited that deal in 2019, three years early, citing changes in the recycling market. I think they only saved 18m quid, about £2.25m pa instead of £3m. That 25% drop in cost savings pa suggests the total saving anticipated was maybe only around 5% max, probably less. Assuming there’re 500,000 households in the area, the cost of waste/recycling collection at the kerbside is on the order of £60m per year, or getting on for £100 on the council tax per household, about £2 a week.
Now, if each Jock household guzzles 7 cans of Irn-Bru a week, topped up with 4 cans of Tennents Super, and each retail outlet serves 750 households, then each machine has to handle 8,000 cans a week, doling out 1,500 quid.
You don’t have to be a Glasgow veteran to spot a nice little earner.
The machine reads the barcode of the bottle/can so it knows which type of material it is. Coke bottles from Denmark are not recognised. I guess that the Scotish returnable bottles will have their own barcode to prevent none-deposit bottles being returned.
Barcode stickers for sale. 10p each.
Same in Grossdeutschland. German and Austrian supermarkets have machines that take either crates or individual bottles ( pop and beer) and give the punter a receipt redeemable against further shopping.
it goes further than that, though.
We had friends staying last weekend and they’d spent quite a bit of time serving in Germany as well. I gave him one of my last cans of Jever brought back from my last trip and we got on to the subject of recycling beer bottles in Germany.
He told me about his trip to the Jever brewery and how when those crates of empties come back on the delivery lorry they aren’t touched by humans again until they are refilled and taken of the delivery lorry, even then it might be when they are picked up by the customer.
He reckoned the bottling plant had 2 people working in it, one in the operations room and one guy walking round with a spanner keeping the machines working. That’s the level of automation you need to make these things pay.
So, I but 6 Gorillion plastic bottles at 2p a dozen, tag a bar code on them and feed them into a machine at Lidl and I get 20p per bottle?
Sounds like a nice little earner.
This is a properly insane project. Actually bonkers.
rUK is considering implementing DRS at some stage quite soon, so it’s utterly insane for Scotland to implement their own – incompatible – system in advance.
I genuinely despair – every single person that has looked at this should have been saying “WTF??” and going straight to the press to say so.
It’s not that this scheme is bonkers: it’s that it’s only making headlines NOW – that means the rot is thorough-going to the point of no return.
I think I’ve mentioned this before.
When I used to live in Munich in the 1990s, there were dire warnings on the bottle banks about not using them
Before 7am and after 7pm
After 1pm Saturdays
At all Sundays and Bank Holidays
Fine 500DM
So basically anytime you were able to chuck something away, you couldnt !
I remember that my local bank was stacked high with bottles and cans dumped there outside of permitted throwing times.
Locally we have deposits, I don’t have enough stuff to make it worth saving to take to recycling centre and collect the deposits back ever 3 Months so I put them in kerbside recycling and someone comes around ahead of the recycling crew to sort through and take them out so they can return them for the deposit
@Harry Haddock’s Ghost
I expect that you would need to pay for each item you apply the bar code to. Or, if manufactured abroad, pay to import any such item. With the payment being the deposit you get back.
@John Galt
Which makes that scheme simple fraud.
Though, of course, there is always a small possibility that the rules do have a loophole somewhere.
Sure, but at this point it makes more sense to highlight government idiocy than worry about illegality.
“You’ve already recruited every kid in the country into earning multiple 20ps”
I’ve got vague recollections of climbing over the wall of the local Co-op after closing time to pilfer returnable Corona bottles waiting for collection, then taking them into the shop a few days later to claim the deposit..
When we lived in Oz we used to see children and down-and-outs picking up aluminium cans.
In childhood, of course, all bottles of pop/lemonade had a deposit you got back. (Beer too? Dunno, I was too young to pay attention.) When did the habit stop and why? I mean, those people who still get doorstep deliveries of milk return the used bottles by leaving them on the doorstep.
When I lived in Germany (Essen/Dusseldorf), the homeless used to scour the trains for bottles and then take them for return on the deposits to the Aldi at Essen Hbf.
Seemed to be effective enough to motivate them.
I expect that you would need to pay for each item you apply the bar code to. Or, if manufactured abroad, pay to import any such item. With the payment being the deposit you get back.
The bar code only has any legal status in SNP Hateland. In rUK, its just a bar code. So I apply for my companies bar code, bung it on every can, and they can do sweet fanny Adams about any that aren’t sold in Scotland. However, when the empties travel north and are popped into the machines, I get my 20p.
Depending how hard it is to copy the barcode and the sensitivity of the machines to the size/weight/shape of the object could be worth sticking copied barcodes on non-deposit items and getting money back. Wouldn’t fool a person but the parameters on the machine might be simple enough it would accept an empty soup can as long as it has the right barcode. I’m guessing the undamaged regulation is for the reverse vending machines
I don’t see the problem with the reverse vending machines.
It’s just a way of capturing the returns from whoever without employing people.
Sounds good; plus the machine should be quicker than some wrinkly crone st the till, so it benefits everybody
@Harry Haddock’s Ghost
You might as well say that these proposed new shops where you serve yourself will never work because people could just pick up the products and walk out with them – it’s essential that shoppers ask the man behind the counter for their fork handles etc. And indeed when supermarkets first appeared some people did think they were crazy, but somehow society adapted.
If there’s an easy way to make money unproductively, there will be laws invented or enforced in an attempt to stop it. Preventing empties being shipped long distance is either not a problem as it achieves the goal of recycling (so, for example, if this traffic is from England to Scotland, the English government might pay the Scottish government for the service of assisting with the recycling), or it’s unwanted in which case it’s no different from forging foreign currency (if the containers are specially marked) or smuggling illegal drugs (if not).
Before too long we might get a deposit return scheme for those little bags of dog schit people leave lying around. I mean if this SNP scheme is about recycling *or* about reducing litter then the same incentive should apply shirley.
Of course they could devolve permission to breed dogs to local authorities, and as a great many have declared climate emergencies which is incompatible with new dog ownership, then let the legal powers and enactments fall where they may.
And kerbside collection for bottles and cans.