I wonder how plastic return numbers would have changed if plastic bottle banks were added beside local amenity glass and can banks before this scam was introduced.
That sort of idea would require a company of highly paid experts set up by the govt to discuss!!!!!!!!!!!!
We used to have them and the council took them out a few years ago as they said it was too expensive and we had recycling bins at home.
😅 Wow. Didnt know there were ever plastic return banks in Ireland. Well it cant be any clearer than that. Plastic banks could have been re-introduced and rolled out nationwide to see how close we could get to EU targets. Instead we get Re-Turn which makes us pay for the running of the DRS and do all the donkey work so Councils dont have to pay for it themselves. Unreal.
Edit: even a straight up tax on each plastic bottle to pay for the extra banks would have been less insulting than Re-Turn. At least we wouldnt see our money spent on clown CEOs on the radio talking rubbish and "professional organisers" talking about container landing spaces.
It's just as well that they don't do plastic bottles. Judging from what happened in Laois a few years back. The people of Laois seem to be a dirty lot all round.
https://www.leinsterexpress.ie/news/mountmellick-/507317/christmas-bottles-dumped-at-laois-bring-bank.html
https://www.leinsterexpress.ie/news/mountmellick-/1470194/shocking-laois-tidy-towns-volunteers-discover-site-of-mass-illegal-dumping.html
Of course this sort of thing happens in England as well.
https://www.hampshirechronicle.co.uk/news/24020532.winchester-waitrose-bottle-bins-overflowing-christmas/
But now Councils are tasked with "policing" retailers in case they sell an inscope container without a logo!!
Still awaiting my enquiry to my CC as to what department is providing the staff or if there will be a new position created!
Might tempt me to come out of retirement lol!!!
Jaysus. Links to bottle banks not emptied by Councils over Christmas. You're back to old habits. Dumping tenuous articles here that have no relevance. All you've highlighted are Councils that didnt empty bottle banks enough or at all over Christmas. Nothing to do with the type of material collected.
Also woeful effort by Laois County Council in general for a town of 5000 residents. I live in a town of 1000 and even we have more bottle banks than this.
The Councils don't empty them. The operation is contracted out to the private sector.
https://glassco.ie/services/
No company offers the geographical reach or levels of experience that Glassco Recycling does when it comes to collecting and recycling glass and cans from bring banks and recycling centres. The company has been at the forefront of every major development in our sector for the last 20 years and we continue to bring new initiatives to the market.
We currently work with 25 local authorities across the country collecting in excess of 70,000 tonnes of glass and cans per annum
Really? Thats your response? The council are still responsible.
Im starting to think you just paste posts into Copilot or similar and dump the answer here.
What is Copilot??
What happens at Christmas is that people use a lot more bottles and cans.
This coincides with the collection truck drivers taking their Christmas days off thus missing collection days.
Worth noting that there could well be similar problems with Re-turn this Christmas.
People probably use the dead of night to do their glass bottle dumping. Won't be possible at the machines, at least the indoor ones.
A true story from this morning. I brought some returns to the local Tesco, the one with four machines, not the one with one machine. Never any problem with queues, even on Sundays. There is a receptacle for plastic waste beside the machines (pre dating the machines). I had some plastic to put into that, but it was stuffed full. With 9 x 15 cent and 1 x 25 cent empty water bottles with the logo. What could I do but retrieve them and walk the few yards to the machine and get an extra €1.60 They were perfectly clean, but with some water in a few of them. But not enough for the machine to reject them.
https://tescoireland.ie/sustainability/product/packaging
Tesco is the least pain in the hole of this pain in the hole scheme, most stores have 4 machines so odds are that 1 is always working and you can use the Re-turn voucher they dispense in any of their stores in the country.
Not weird at all you hang out at machines taking photos of people. It's not uncommon for people to fill a few big bags make one journey to these machines rather than going every week.
Another successful return at local Supervalu. Voucher for 3.5o, got 3L of milk and 35c in change.
LOL.
Yaaaaay, you got your money back after going out of your way to do so and then bought something else.
What a result!
🤣
He got change as well though!! 😅
Pfft! I don't "hang out at machines taking photos of people." You really think that's their household waste? I suppose it's common for people to fill a few trolleys of shopping, make one journey to the shops a month, rather than going every week? You know what profession wear those trousers?
Does anyone else go to the trouble of bringing cans and bottles back only to forget they have a voucher by the time you go to pay for groceries?
Yeah, I usually remember just after paying
It used to happen to me all the time. Now I place the receipt on top of my bank card in my wallet, so I can't forget.
You seem to be the only one in this thread with multiple posts of photos of the machines, some including people, so yeah, it’s a bit weird to be honest. Pants determines profession now too? Also a weird viewpoint. People don’t tend to fill multiple trolleys of food and do one shop a month because most fresh food doesn’t last that long. Good try at a false equivalency though. Marks for effort at least.
Yeah, I've started doing that lately. 🤪
I'm not taking sides in this spat but just for your own information. Many people only do a supermarket shop once a month. Fresh food is weekly but in a green grocers, or butchers, while the local shop is for bread, milk etc. I'll only visit a supermarket once a month and even then will only bring the bottles and cans when the bags are full.
How's it weird? I've a phone with a camera. You might have heard of them. People use these machines all the time, I go to the shops almost daily, so it's not weird to make note of my observations.
My point was most people visit shops several times a week. Why would they wait several weeks letting things pile up, possibly creating a smell, leaks, taking up more space, before returning their empties? The photos I've posted aren't of people with household waste. I think you're being disingenuous(11 posts, hmm), so I'm probably done here.
No one will ever know - they never even attempted to tweak the existing collection methods/infrastructure for some strange reason.
EDIT:
I see somewhere they were in place - I for one never knew about them - perhaps if they had the marketing budget of return and the backup that return are getting - they may have been a success.
Again somebody who thinks everybody else is like they are. Living many miles from town means some people only visit a shop with a return centre every few weeks or once a month. Not everybody has access to a shop with a returns machine several times a week. That's why the recycling bins at home were so useful.
There is a solution for that in the Voucher Plan section here:
https://re-turn.ie/re-turn-teams-up-with-professional-organiser-sarah-reynolds-to-create-clever-storage-hacks-for-bottles-and-cans/
Hear Hear! My nearest supermarket/bank is 17 miles away. Therefore, I try to make one trip a week for shopping, banking etc. As it is, a round trip costs me over €7.00 in petrol alone.
These incidents and photos are from urban areas.
Maybe for you. But where I am, there's probably at least a few hundred DRS machines within that radius.
