Deposit return scheme (recycling)

People that went to the effort of bringing their bottles and cans to the machine, which were then rejected. I can understand why they, in frustration, left their bottles and cans by the machine.

If the machine won't take them, why not leave them there in the hope that Return will take them away to be recycled, which is the whole point of this farce.

I don't see why they should be brought home to the green bin, which could have been used in the first instance except these folks wanted their money back.

Home compliance was probably quite high (generally a lot cheaper to put stuff in green bin than black bin) but anything you put in a bin when you're not at home (on the street/at the office etc.) was very unlikely to be recycled. Even in offices where they have separate bins you always see cleaners come and empty them all into the same bin (presumably because the recycling bin is always contaminated by idiots). Stats showed that overall levels of recycling in the country are very low.

If it was priced right, people would take their cans and bottles home with them rather than chucking them in random bins. Though at the moment, it's priced too low for people to care imo.

Probably a matter of not getting in at the right time and right price for habit formation. They probably looked at the price being charged on the continent thinking it would work just as well here, not taking into account that those schemes were introduced when 15c/25c was worth a lot more and nowadays returning empties is just routine for people in those countries.

Introducing a 15c charge on plastic bags was very effective here but that was 2002 , 22 years of inflation have happened since.

Yes someone else mentioned that problem previously.

It seems it's another issue to be added to the list.

Obviously you can't be left out of pocket.

One way around it would be to find a manual return place.

Mr Price might suit

https://re-turn.ie/store-detail/mr-price-athy-kildare-r14-yn83/

I can understand too but I wouldn't condone leaving a mess like that for store staff to clean up.

I asked return eight weeks ago how we are supposed to help home bound people to which they replied they were setting up a focus group to look at it. Why this wasn't considered in the so called public consultation is beyond me. Ive followed up since and they no longer reply. They have your money, they dont care.

Also, our collection rates were really good by eu standards, bar the issue with on the go pet bottles. People seperated, recycled, cleaned the materials and paid for the service. Turns out that after collection, some waste companies incinerated everything anyway. That is a problem the government should have addressed with the waste companies rather than lumping state sponsored theft on the people who were doing the right thing all along.

I see someone asked earlier in thread too. why do the large bottles have a bigger tax when these werent an issue with street dumping? As somebody living in one of the areas with recent alerted water quality issues , i am not happy having to give this notable sum of money to return just for the privilege of not making my family sick.

Plain simple theft and disgraceful environmental damage being done.

A simple law banning incineration of recycling materials could be done with the stroke of a pen. But i guess the ceo of return wouldn't be getting a tasty salary to go on air and lie to the public and talk absolute scutter. Remember they said to get in touch if you encounter issues? I did, they want nothing to do with it.

I think their slogan should change from Convenient for all, to just give us your money and shut your mouth.

Aldi have put that cage there to collect those items, it's not exactly abandoned on the floor.

Hopefully the staff and company complain to Return, and get these machines working, or better yet, banished to wherever the e-voting machines are.

I wouldn't expect a shop assistant to have to sort through paper, plastic, cardboard and who knows what else.

The machines are Aldi's responsibility.

Their CEO was interviewed on RTE radio prior to launch and was quite clear that house bound people should phone his office if they had difficulty with getting deposits back and that they/ he would sort it. That he could give such a loose response to an obvious question, shows that he was not on top of the task or capable of implementing the scheme fairly.

Translation: "Ignore the house bound and old feckers later. Jackpot!".

Just to explain what I am doing. You are an articulate and considered poster, I am sure you can appreciate where I am coming from and what I am trying to do.

In the absence of any clear data (we both agree there) I am interested in trying to establish what % of items sold today would be sold with deposit. I have set out my hypothesis (that it is above 90%), I have provided my methodology and I have provided my data. I have opend this all up to scrutiny and invited people who may have better data to share it so that if my number is wrong we get something more accurate.

The way to challenge a hypothesis is to provide alternative data, of an equal or higher standard. You have not done this as yet, you have given an anecdote and an opinion that supermarket shopping is not representative of the market. Nobody else on here, i.e. other than you, has commented my claim of the number being 90% or more.

So I say my hypotheses stands until something better is provided, by you or by anyone else. I would be very happy to accept a real number in place of my own, as I say my motivation here is to get any idea of what it is - I am not here to debate personal anecdotes.

I am aware that I am conducting shelf counts, which do not equate to sales, but I am confident any number I produce underestimates the actual % because the items I see for sale with no deposit tend to be sub-brand, unusual flavours, slow moving items, etc - not the items that sell in volume. For example, of the 2 stores I went to in the last 2 days, the only coca cola item I found with no deposit was a 500ml vanilla flavoured bottle.

I will report data as I see it, and if I find any contrary data myself, or anyone else posts better data I will accept I am then wrong with my 90%.

In addition to the online shopping data I previously posted details from 2 in store visits (post 4093), and I have since made 2 more store visits. I am going to be in a few different locations around Ireland in the coming days so I will try to post others.

• Fri 12 April, Centra Store, Midlands - 132 items in chiller, 9 no deposit (93.2% with deposit)
• Fri 12 April, Spar at M7 Plaza - 109 items in chiller, 4 no deposit (96.33% with deposit)
• Wed 17 April, Gala / Filling Station, Laois - 79 items in chiller, 21 no deposit (73.2% with deposit)
• Thurs 18 April, Supervalu Portlaoise - 171 items in chiller 1, 27 no deposit, 108 in chiller 2, 10 no deposit (86.7% with deposit)

Actually i didnt say that. I said product put on the market, not product sold. Im not sure if Return has the data for product sold. The scheme charges the producer the deposit, the producer charges the retailer the deposit, the retailer charges the customer.

Re-turn remits to the retailer based on the returns that they make, the rvms are hooked into the return iT system, but I dont know that the sales information is.

They may have that sales data, but i wouldnt be sure of it. Once all the product on the market is in scope then you can work out the return rate based on product on market.

I think somebody needs to make / clear out some room at the storage facility where we keep the old e-voting machines..

Because a week after our bin collectors say that they will need to put up their fees, because all the good stuff is gone from the recycle bins, That's when it all kicks off ..

The e voting machines are history long since.

Scrapped and gone forever, no loss.

We have already had numerous reports of bin companies increasing charges.

So far nobody has posted a breakdown of the Increases showing the proportion allocated to the loss of recyclables.

They'll be binned off, eventually. The stick is to increase prices. Nobody is going to pay 1€ per item, but that is the only stick left in the playbook.