Deposit return scheme (recycling)

jj880

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121942366#Comment_121942366

2 months ago or even a month ago everything was being disputed and jumped on. Its fast getting to the point there's no disputing this mess.

LambshankRedemption

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121942394#Comment_121942394

And yet inexplicably some will continue to do so.

ozmo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121940819#Comment_121940819

Wonder how much power these large things use - with the 24/7 screens, scanners, industrial pc running inside and very powerful motors and trash compactor.

Much more I would guess than the energy you could recover from the relatively few plastic bottles It takes in.

John_Rambo

You'll get used to it. Just like you did the smoking ban in the workplace, recycling your glass and using durable bags for shopping instead of paying for plastic bags.

jj880

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121942457#Comment_121942457

Instead of a voucher the RVMs should just print out this picture.

Sconsey

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121942505#Comment_121942505

The difference being the smoking ban prevents peoples exposure to second-hand smoke, recycling glass actually leads to some glass being recycled, getting rid of single use plastic bags got rid of single use plastic bags....this scheme does not promote a reduction in plastic use, it does not mean any increase in recycling will happen (still incinerating plastic as usual), it has lead to stealth price increases and the technical implementation is a shambles (broken machines, return logs bottles refused, deposits charged and returns not accepted).

If the scheme was focused on reduction I would be all for it, if it was for increasing the volumes of plastic recycled (not just collected for incineration) I would be all for it, if it was implemented in a reliable way I would be be more inclined to go along with it.

Genghis

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121942394#Comment_121942394

Indeed. I've noticed it's mostly silence that the slow numbers are met with these days.

I think even those on here who were very much in favour of this scheme at launch know it is not exactly going to plan so far, and that fig leaf explanations like lag, transition, limited data etc are starting to fade.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121942871#Comment_121942871

I'd think its more than only those desperate for it to fail are still banging the drum about it failing (it won't).

Come June when everythings in scope this thread will be dead; and a few users will have slunk away from it as their predictions of failure came to naught.

ForestFire

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121942457#Comment_121942457

Let's hope they've made these machines to be recycled.......just in case.....

Genghis

@L1011 just for avoidance of any doubt I do not wish for this to fail, and have never done so.

I strongly disagree with DRS, and am not participating in it as a result, but I certainly never expected the scheme to fail, below is a comment showing me saying same.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121602416/#Comment_121602416

Whereas at that time you and I would have completely shared the expectation that this will bed down and be like other countriy's experience, I am not as sure anymore.

Do you really believe that a daily 10% collection almost 2 months in indicates that this will take off in 2 more months time? Do you think the great public are politely waiting for the final few items of old stock to disappear before they en masse begin using it? I expect 95% of the population have pad a deposit, why are they not claiming them back yet do you think?

Imho daily collection rate should already be 30-40% minuimum and still be growing. It was widely believed getting to base 1, i.e. 60-70% (displacing recycled at kerbside) would be straightforward, and DRS would then eat in to the rest so that we hit the 90% goal. That is not happening.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121942991#Comment_121942991

The stats we have for returns are two weeks old; and while your checking of supermarket websites is giving figures that we otherwise don't have a source for, the reality is there are still plenty of out of scope items in Tesco despite the website showing 100% compliance, let alone the other shops. So there isn't any solid basis to make a 10% estimate, and I'd say it is actually closer to 30% based on what I'm seeing.

This thread has all the people complaining and griping on it; so is not representative of reality. If you read this thread, you would assume that it is more common to find a broken/full RVM than a working one which is simply untrue.

I'm yet to see a Britvic (Pepsi/Club) item in scope; Coca Cola Ireland in many shops is definitely 100% already - but one small shop near me has only just stopped selling Santa branded bottles let alone pre-Feb stock, and he shifts quite a lot. No idea where the feck he stores it all cause the shop is tiny. Loads of Scots live near me so everywhere sells Irn Bru, its all non-returnable still. Local brewery (Farringtons) has only a few lines in scope, rest is still old stock.

What I buy is probably 90% in-scope but what's on shop shelves near me, in terms of shelf space, might still be 50% or less; likely higher in terms of volume due to Coca Cola's dominance, but not 90%.

I expect we're going to see people complaining about having to wait a few minutes at a machine next week due to people offloading the results of the 3/4 day weekend; and when all those are ingested I'd expect another press release on volume.

Ken Tucky

Long time lurker..

Finally brought my cans back tonight. Drove to one shop..both machines out of order. Drove to the next shop and off I went. 3 cans rejected. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the bar code to read. All cans were from the same multi pack.

This is nonsense, it really is.

Why business isn't expected to row in with recycling is beyond me.

Households do recycling. How many of us work in a small business. The bin in our canteen is always full of cans and bottles and this goes straight into general waste. No onus on the company at all. Thousands upon thousands of sme's all over the country doing the same thing. Building sites with skips..

Buts it's the households with a perfect recycling bin sitting by that are the culprits. So much BS in this country.

Also, they chose aluminium because they wanted a slice of the pie.

chrisd2019

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121940186#Comment_121940186

Piss poor article, any deposit paid if bottle legitimately in scheme is recoverable.

chrisd2019

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121941366#Comment_121941366

It makes no difference to the consumer how the system works, all that matters is that you get back your original deposit.

BoardsBottler

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121943309#Comment_121943309

from my experiance of the latter as mentioned a couple of posts back, the machine spits out your receipt when full and then says something like out of service or machine full, and either a red hand or a red stop sign.

The first situation you mentioned someone earlier today mentioned here going through something simular and then having to get one of the workers to come unclog the machine and gave him the receipt that did'nt come out (which i was surprised with). From my own experiance and alot of the other people that expressed the same thing here, if the machine jams when you're using it we're pretty much screwed and cheated out of the money for the bottles and cans that has already went into the machine. Someone also mentioned yesterday or today that there's a tip for lidl iirc where if you touch the top of the screen it tells you how close to being full the machine is. Not sure if this works in all machines or just lidl machines.

elperello

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121943309#Comment_121943309

What should happen in either case is that a shop assistant asks you how many items you've put in and pays you the deposits.

Its called business, goodwill etc.

nachouser

It's a troll pretending to be Jim.

elperello

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121943451#Comment_121943451

Thanks for the heads up.

I hope Jim is still to the good 😊

Atlantic Dawn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121943365#Comment_121943365

If the newly released figures are true you have personally got near 0.1% of the amount given out for the entire country, a nice achievement all the same 😁

sligeach

So let me see if I've got this right by looking at certain figures. 5 million cans and plastic bottles are sold a day in Ireland. In the first 40 days, €1.2 million was claimed by consumers in the RVM scheme. So if we average the 15-25 cent deposit, to 20 cent, that would mean 6 million items have been returned.

Sure you can say the turnover of non-RVM labelled stock would have taken time to switch over to the new labels. But the majority of stock now in shops have the new labels. No matter what way you look at it, that's a bit of a disaster.

You know what the government will do if it continues like this, they'll up the deposit rates.

I think the scheme is a scam and I hope the RVM machines end up in the same warehouse as the electronic voting machines. Another government fiasco of the past.

odyssey06

Seen on a twitter thread discussing the scheme:

And to my great grandchildren I leave my bag of assorted Re-Turn plastic bottles...

I have an ever growing bag of diet coke cans ready to cash in if i can find a working machine. It is taunting me at this point but the visual has not stopped me from adding to the bag, daily...

https://twitter.com/ItsCherrySue/status/1772726570114793572

jj880

What I find interesting are those on here who would rather die in a ditch than admit this scheme was badly conceived. They'll tinker round the edges regarding rogue retailers, faulty RVMs etc. but not a word about the scheme itself. Cant be saying anything bad about its implementation for some reason. Even trying to blame EU directives. The EU didn't come up with Re-Turn. Our lads did. You'd nearly think some on this thread were involved in designing it.

Is Re-Turn really the correct RVM scheme for Ireland as it stands? It could be with changes but it looks a long way off that at the moment.

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121943274#Comment_121943274

Well somebody asked

Genghis

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121943012#Comment_121943012

Re-turn have near real time data on collections and they also decide when numbers are released. It has been 7 days, not 2 weeks since the last numbers were released (7m as of 19 Mar, link below).

Re-turn tend to do their presswork on Tuesdays. The pattern below to me looks like the numbers they have are not currently good.

5 Mar - yay, over 2m items

12 Mar - yay again, over 5.6m items

19 Mar - single article in IT (20 Mar), "almost" 7m items (not so yay)

26 Mar - co-ordinated press activity all in one day across Indo, RTE, The Journal and Newstalk that avoids any specific item number being mentioned but focussed on why people are not reclaiming deposits.

The narrative has gone from "what a great start" to "millions going unclaimed" in 3 weeks.

Let's see what they say next week, hopefully they will be transparent, and month end / half way to transition is a natural reporting point.

But my honestly held opinion is that daily collection numbers are 300k to 400k and items sold with deposit is around 4m. I cannot get to your 30% daily ratio, it means believing something like only 40% of sales are deposit (2m of 5m sold) and daily collection is something like 600,000 items.

Based on what I observed neither of them numbers seem likely to me.

Link: last article that reported numbers:

https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2024/03/19/deposit-scheme-refunds-12m-to-customers-returning-cans-and-plastic-bottles/

thebourke

One thing i have noticed is that R symbol should be highlighted in a larger font at the back.Sometimes its not easy to spot it.

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121943817#Comment_121943817

How are you supposed to claim anything when most machines are broken or out of service? Where's that article?

Instead we get a lazy one with massive financial values to antagonise us over not being able to make successful returns. I don't know whether I'm more annoyed by the scheme or the journalism blowing (non carbon based) smoke up the schemes backside!

homingbird

<mod snip>

threadbanned - discussing fraud

galldar

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121933942#Comment_121933942

I thought re-turn themselves would be the data source, is this not so?

If RVMs checked barcodes online in this manner, there should be no issues with retailers accepting own brand items from other retailers (they hardly get updated at intervals with updated lists?)

Jeff2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121942071#Comment_121942071

I'm not questioning a mod post or moderation but I love this post.

Also @BoardsBottler when you get to your quest off €1k can you let us know what you would really put in the RVM per month to reflect a real return to average person.

I won't be returning anything as can't do so.