There is a phrase, Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
It would almost be nice to think this was a concerted effort, a conspiracy if you will by the top retailers in the country to drive footfall into their shops. The reality however is a half-assed pandering to the green agenda. Buy the cheapest machines available, Install them around the country. We will figure out the finer points later on. The people will fall in line.
You need a category all of your own 😁. Entrepreneur!
Scheme seems to be going well 😂...
A nice little earner for some. €20 million unclaimed.
So is it the retailer that gets to keep the unclaimed deposit?
No, it is Re-Turn/Repak who get to keep the unclaimed deposit. Their company accounts will be an item of interested on the business news for years to come.
Surprise, surprise! No one REALLY thought this was about "de environment" did they?
Introduce an intentionally awkward scheme in an inconsistent, unreliable way that is of no benefit to anyone who already recycled via their bin collection, and of course many weren't going to bother with it (in the same way as, using my other example from the other day, Dublin Bus had millions in unclaimed change too).
From the article :
Neither retailers nor Re-turn can retain unclaimed deposits indefinitely so if cash piles up, it will be put into recycling initiatives.
Riiiight! Sounds like another vague "notion", much like this whole idea! What about the interest on those deposits? Who keeps that?
You can definitely be sure someone is making money somewhere! This isn't charity. Sure as we've seen, in this country even charity isn't charity!
Just read this in the Indo. Quite frankly it is astonishing proof of how we are effectively being taxed as the scheme is so biased against the end user, you and me, the customers.
Where do they get these figures from, I would doubt it is anything near that:
"Ireland recycles about 60pc of plastic drinks bottles but the Deposit Return Scheme aims to get that to 90pc.
Can-recycling rates are higher but also need improvement"
That's why the scheme came in the way it did though, it wasn't just random chance that the vouchers have to be used in that store, the retailers of a large size asked for that and the smaller businesses weren't happy they were effectively now sending customers to their bigger competitors.
It can only be described as an abject failure.
"In the 40 days to that date, Re-turn took back almost seven million containers – 3.4 million plastic bottles and 3.6 million cans. That left around 193 million containers either awaiting return or already disposed of."
It appears that most people are just seeing this as another tax and not returning the containers.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....
The 193m figure is nonsense, though - they're assuming that every container sold was in scope whereas even now, they aren't all in scope - and at the start virtually nothing was.
The Indo, never known for good journalism, is now a rag chasing sensationalist headlines.
Rubbish, if you don't buy it, then you don't pay it.
I can't stand this scheme.
A scheme dreamt up by student union types, imagining some kind of scenario like they're living in Home & Away with loads of free time and space in their houses, where the homeless scour the streets keeping them clean as they get enough money to lift themselves out of homelessness.
I house share. I have no space as it was! Now I have to have a bag in my room. I don't drink cans very often but I have a multipack box in the car that I take the odd can from. Now, I have to keep the **** bag in my room, cans jingling. I'm not going to return a single can for 15c or 2 cans for 30c to get a paper voucher and then have to use it at the till.
As always, it's those green voters with their big houses where they can put a 3rd bin with a shop just up the road they can pop their bag into their SUV on a Saturday morning with their beige 3/4 length pants, sunglasses and flip flops that are unaffected by this.
I HATE the greens. I may just start putting the cans into my black bin. **** them.
How brainless do you have to be to introduce this system? WHY do multipacks need them? No one brings multipacks onto the streets! Multipacks are consumed at home where we were already recycling them!!
Welcome to Ireland.
Gombeens abound dreaming up shambolic front loaded scams / schemes to turn a quick buck.
Costumer is just a cow to be milked for every shilling possible.
Only good thing about this mess is they cant hide the stats. It will be there for everyone to see as Re-Turn limps on.
Higher deposits are definitely in the post.
I posted on this topic before where i noticed in the large post primary where i work that many students are indifferent to the whole recycling concept. The volume of plastic bottles and cans is the same as before, Many of the students seem to have no problem with cash as very few seem to bring packed lunches with them. So i cant see them being too concerned abot 25 cents here and there. I agree with other posters that this is an ill thought out scheme.Someone somewhere is making money from this .
I am a huge fan of the theory behind this scheme I'll be one of the ones going out with my local sports club for the annual Good Friday cleanup and hoping to make a few bob for the club on these products in the local lidl
However even I am not oblivious to the downfalls we have in the Irish system
If it was only one of these issues I'd say fair enough but combined I am not surprised by the Indo article this morning.
Just to be clear this scheme has nothing to do with the greens, yes the greens like the scheme and yes the current environment minister is a green party TD and did introduce the sceheme. It is important to note though that the government only introduced the scheme as part of wider EU requirements. If the greens were in opposition we would still see this scheme introduced
Full disclosure. I am not a green party supporter. There are many many many reasons to hate the greens. The deposit return scheme is not one of those reasons
Just saw this from a previous poster "Waste disposal is already in private hands, people pay for it already and make use of what they already pay for. This situation clearly should have been reversed before this scheme came in" What an excellent observation I had forgotten that part of the scheme Myself and Mrs Sliabh are very much pro recycling and are very fastidious about how we go about it. But for the life of me this present scheme defies logic and common sense.
But for the life of me this present scheme privatisation of waste collection defies logic and common sense.
Fixed your comment for you. If we had public waste collection that was free at the point of use this scheme would make much more sense
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do not request help or advice to commit fraud.
The version of the scheme we have here, with all its flaws - that's under the watch of the Green Party minister.
This scheme will be gone by Christmas. I’ve never used one of the machines and never will. Another very costly mistake by our fearless “leaders”. Anyone without their head in the clouds could have predicted this.
One can only hope but I'd say they will just keep increasing deposits until they get compliance. Only way to bypass this scheme is to boycott it, sodastream and 5L bottles of water and then Newry for alcohol (or stick to bottled beer). This is how I'm approaching it!
from their 2020 manifesto
I'm assuming it was one of the green party things for the program for government.
For people against the scheme - what would your solution be to the plastic waste issue?
My current domestic recycling bin is fine thanks. Always has.
I was in Tesco the other day and wanted to pick up some sparkling waters. 12pk is now 6:50 with this nonsense. Needless to say I left them at the till. Now that isn't all related to this BS. Tesco have also thrown a few cent onto it.
12 bottles was previously €3.95 or so.
I was in the states a few months ago and the plastic usage over there would shock you coupled with the lack of recycling in most areas. But hey little old ireland are the problem.
This scheme is ludicrous the more we see it in action and the more we see the reports of it being an utter failure. But nevertheless I'd expect our headbanger green wing to continue with it out of pure spite.
This is it. They will just gouge and ride people until we stop buying plastic. That's all the will happen here.
First thing - actually determine what the collection rates are for the specific items that are in scope of the scheme.
Next thing to have tried was free collection points like we have for glass.
Look out this alleged contamination of the items when in green bins.
If after that an RVM scheme is needed, shops should have to take manual returns if the machine is out of order. The exemption should have been kept at 150 square metres so that more outlets would offer manual returns.
There are locations in the scheme such as Dublin Airport which makes no sense to include and which are going to screw up the reported collection stats.
The machines should have been made wheelchair accessible.
The roll out period has been an absolute shambles, the confusion over what is in scope, does it need the logo or not.
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