I was there last weekend and there are dunnes 2 machines side by side and a bin right beside them.
Shop A gets the processing fee irrespective of whether or not they deal with your refund. They are paid for processing the cans/bottles. If you leave the voucher in your wallet they still get paid the processing fee. As each retailer is registered with Re-turn it shouldn't be difficult for Shop B to get reimbursed for any refund vouchers they are presented.
In Australia you can get your deposit credited to your bank account when you make a return. You can choose to take a voucher for store A if you wish. You can also build up your deposit online and use it to buy vouchers for other stores. Ultimately the consumer has the choice. And the machines over there are supplied by Tomra the same company that supply them here. It's just a sop to certain retailers to do it the way we are doing it here. Transferring footfall away from smaller retailers to larger stores with RVMs.
Not sure of your claim of hyper-inflation. Certainly in my local shops armed with government little calculator I noticed no price increases.
They are getting 2.2 per item in an RVM, and footfall going their way. For larger shops, they should end up in profit if they are handling enough items in the RVM.
Smaller shops, the economies of scale are against them, and RVM too expensive for them.
There's been complaints about the scheme from small shop owners that they'd either have to deal with the costs and hassle of manual handling... or basically they are directing customers to other shops to use RVMs.
The scheme should'nt be an inconvenience to people, or make people have to go out of their way to get money back thats already theres to begin with. it's clearly an inherent flaw in the scheme.
100% THIS.
I honestly don't know, but someone up-thread posted that they thought it was to encourage increased footfall to shops.
I don't care what anyone says, the shops have to be getting something out of this, as it must be an inconvenience to them too.
You bring your cans and bottles to shop A, they are due a retailers cut for taking your discards and giving you refund. But they have refunded you with a piece of paper that you must spend in shop.
If you were to take voucher to shop B, why would they refund you when they will not get repaid from return, or get a retailers cut? It's lose lose for shop B to give you money for shop A's gain, who, will get the refund and a retailers cut, and not have to pay out the refund. win win win for shop A.
If Shop A is part of a large chain, then they can make it convenient for their customers by allowing this, and knowing the wins and loses will cancel out over the chain.
The system needs to change and return take ownership of the machines, for a system like you are suggesting to work. Then they could see where the item was discarded, half retailers cut there, and where the voucher was redeemed, other half of the retailer cut goes and deposit reimbursement goes there. If same shop gets the rubbish and pays out the refund, they get full retailers cut and deposit reimbursement.
It worked very well. We were talk of the world.
Project/ Activity Results:
One of the key findings of the plastic bag levy was that there was a considerable fall in the consumption of plastic bags since March 2002. The reduction has been estimated as 90%. Furthermore, results from beach surveys found that there was a reduction in the number of plastic bags found on beaches, from a mean high of 17.7per 500m (2000) to a mean of 5.5 bags per 500m (2002). (Data courtesy of Coastwatch Ireland.)
Someone hasn't read the thread.
Oh but it was! You can even search on here for the conversations at the time.
Difference being that was done reasonably well and made sense. Saying that, I still have a drawer full of plastic bags that I didn't pay for so I'm not sure it actually worked as well as intended.
It was when NI raised it in 2022, I remember there was talk of mass protests in the form of bringing your own shopping bags with you and refusing to pay for the bags from the shop
I think the protesters might have missed the point
That would involve me queueing up in a shop to cash in a voucher.
That is not convenient for me, as I do my grocery shopping online.
As the scheme operates now, I won't bother - I will continue to use my green bin as I have always done, and if it's contents goes to landfill or incineration?
Not my problem.
Introducing the Euro was a 2 year long process and resulted in hyper-inflation here in Ireland when the notes and coins did eventually came in due to the greed of the retailers. I wouldn't say it came without major problems
Yup. Thankfully the internet wasn't really around when the plastic bag levy came in
It hasn't happened in the meca for this type of thing (Germany) more plastic bottles than ever in circulation apparantly.....
Is the long term goal of this awful scheme to make plastic bottles an absolute pain in the arse for everyone involved and it's a matter of time before producers start changing their packaging to those awful cardboardy type bottles just to avoid all the hassle.
If that's where we're going to end up then there's been a huge amount of money spent on those machines for very little reward. I'm just taking the 15c as another "green" tax and will continue to use the recycle bin as always. I just can't buy into this absolute mess of a scheme.
i think his point is if he brings his cans back to the machine then realizes there is a big que in that shop and no chance of bein able to just pop in and redeem it within 5 minutes due to a que (or is in a rush) then he's stuck between choosing to having to come back to the store another time or else waiting in that que. Furthermore it would be far more convenient if he could get the voucher print out and bring that to another shop that is doing the RVM things but without a que. Being tied to using it in the same shop is an inconvenience and creates the dilemma of having to see if there's a que BEFORE deciding to put the cans into the machine. And when people are in a time-senstive situation, popping ones head in the door is'nt always ideal.
The scheme should'nt be an inconvenience to people, or make people have to go out of their way to get money back thats already theres to begin with. it's clearly an inherent flaw in the scheme. At the very least re-turn should be willing to change their policy to instead allow people to keep the voucher and be able to redeem it in any other of the same franchise instead of tying it to just the same store that printed it.
They're in shops, issuing shop specific vouchers, nearly everywhere.
What was the logic behind tying it to a shop? Was it a sop to retailers, "Oh sorry we're putting the machines here - look, we'll force them to use it in your shop!"
Was tying it a specific shop used in schemes in other countries?
Exchange it for cash then.
Thats true, but even if it were franchise specific rather than shop specific atleast they would be meeting us half way.
They really don't seem to bend or meet us halfway on any of this. it would be nice if re-turn had a scout or spokesperson come onto these forums and accept hearing out people and listening to suggestions to help figure out a work-around on this that can atleast help us.
They've made it much more difficult than it needs to be. it would be nice if there was some voting taking place related to this scheme.
The fact that the voucher is shop specific is another major problem with the scheme as far as I'm concerned.
You're supposed to be getting your own money back.
As far as I am aware, I can spend my money where I want. Not where a supermarket tells me I can.
They call us "Keyboard Warriors" I believe.
It's good advice.
It could save people from losing money.
I didn't realize people had so little time on their hands to return a bag of plastic bottles. So little time they can post endlessly on here crying about this scheme.
I suppose it would take a bit of thinking to solve that problem. I've said this before but more public recycle bins are a start. The naysayers suggest these will be abused by bad people. Ok, put them in places with CCTV ideally or look at something that only accepts a certain type of material, by scanning it, checking it's size etc and see can such a device be modified so that it can be made smaller, not as complex and perhaps a bit weather proof yet still only accept certain types of item. I wonder if there a similar device out there that works like this......
Take the whole deposit payment and receipt BS out of the equation all together.
Just an idea. Obviously the finest minds in the world haven't it figures out but you have to start somewhere to get a solution to the issue you suggest. A significant portion of bottles and cans are bought through these channels and like other issues we have highlighted, this scheme will be a costly failure and worse still will set back green initiatives by years.
LOL - who'd be arsed doing that for a few cents that you might or might not get when you go to an actual machine.
Only zealots with endless time on their hands would be bothered to check barcodes on some website.
The entire lot of them should be fired, Minister and Return. Clearly utterly incapable of getting even their limited scheme to work from the get go.
The problem there is the voucher is shop specific i.e you can only use the voucher in the shop you returned the containers to.
So you load a voucher on from dunnes and try use it then in Aldi or wherever.
Bringing your stuff with ya shopping, do your shopping, use voucher is the simplest solution for most people, right now.
I thought the poster was meant to state where your nearest one was.
The exemption here for retailers is huge, 250 square metres. In the original proposal it was only 150 square metres. The government caved in the "consultation" to the retailers.
So when people say we copied the same scheme as elsewhere, we didn't, unless they can find us what other country has such a large exemption.
Which centras? Which towns like?
I'm not saying we need a full address or Eircode. Town or even townland would do. The fact that even this isn't provided makes me question the legitimacy of such claims
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://wd.vanillicon.com/v2/dbd35c43580ff62b54e9919958f2a898.svg)
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://wf.vanillicon.com/v2/fd699616e9252d3cd408c2c9afd664e6.svg)
