Deposit return scheme (recycling) - Part 2

Soda water?

I suspect the reason 330ml has not been reduced yet is because its a standard size/format all across Europe. It would cost producers here too much to roll out an Ireland only size.

Ask dxhound how the price of soda water has gone. Thats where the real interesting data lies.

Use the cheap Tesco cola for that delicious mocktail. It is just the same as the big brands, fizzy coloured sugary water. I wouldn't pay three times the price to get Schweppes or Club Soda Water. It is just fizzy water.

https://www.tesco.ie/groceries/en-IE/products/257730721?srsltid=AfmBOooGVN0qzlmxY0CBjXglnfjzt5gXSwjb-UvCv-xiF9rkxX1aNtnv

I've got those in two different cafes - neither charged a deposit (at least explicitly) so I just left them the cans.

There are versions with logo, and presumably a different barcode

The one I got came from a vending machine. But that image is from Dunnes

Time to get on to THE ENFORCERS! You know the one's appointed by your local County Council as………………..

Enforcement

Each local authority shall be responsible for the enforcement of the provisions of these Regulations within their functional areas and shall appoint authorised persons to take such steps as are necessary for this purpose.

Would love to see what happens if you actually tried contacting a local authority about a wonky barcode.

Reminds me of a line from dinnerladies.

Nichola: What would happen if I asked for a herbal tea?

Jean: Nothing.

Nichola: You mean you wouldn't be phased by such a request?

Jean: No, I mean you wouldn't get one.

Not impossible, and not without precedent in adjacent contexts too.

When Coca Cola run on-product competitions / promotions they create unique, non predictable claim codes and print them on hundreds of millions of units: they could do this up to 25 years ago using dot matrix printed alphanumeric sequences only. McDonalds do the same to this day across multiple products when they run Monopoly games, same with lottery tickets until a few years back, etc.

Now I am not suggesting 25 year old solutions for Re-turn, fiddly text based codes manually typed or OCRer, etc: all I am saying is when Coca Cola needed to produce mass scale, unique, non predictable codes, they could do it, and they could do it long before any QR code ever existed.

QR codes would, of course, be used today, they are machine readable, printable at scale and I expect you know how practically infinite / boundless QR codes are, and their wide usage for value storage, so are completely safe.

We could also limit fraud with controls like payment on collection (units collected if less than units scanned), usage limits, etc. On your point, "unless cryptographically secure you could just print barcodes", this risk, for example, would be controlled by refunding on the units collected as counted by weight and other controls. What, after all, is stopping me printing 200 2D barcodes timorrow and cashing them in for €50 at an RVM: the physical check an RVM does is what, I would need 200 bottle shape items (not so easy to print). So an equivalent control check, in conjunction with the QR code, makes code fraud impossible.

Of course you are completely correct, doing things this way would be highly impractical. Especially for producers.

instead, we adopted a scheme that spread all of the inconvenience, and the majority of cost and burden of adopting a circular recovery scheme onto the hapless consumer and the middleman retailer.

The producers who perpetuate single use plastic unit production in the billions of units continue today as they did before, with negligible business model disruption.

A scheme such as the one we are discussing here will not happen anytime soon. This is mainly because we have the RVM only model now, and there is no incentive whatsoever for producers (who look to have all the influence here) to change anything. The goose is cooked, at least for now.

Leaving that aside, and acknowledging that the very idea of an alternative way itself is hypothetical, none of the reasons you offer in your posts are insurmountable.

Anything you say are only design considerations for a system that is pre-design. I am not seeing any show-stoppers.

For a DRS system to work, we just need:

• A way of coding eligible items at scale
• A way to validate codes on an items return at scale
• An operating framework that controls deposit movement and can be trusted, can not be abused, is auditable and has no privacy or similar concerns.

By combining existing technologies like QR codes and blockchain and by layering physical checks at point of collection, such a system is very achievable in technical terms.

All that is lacking is any incentive to create it.

You don't know how much re-turn have invested in trucks, or how much they spend annually on the operation of collecting waste. None of that has been released, at least to my knowledge.

Neither do you, or anyone else, know what an alternative might have cost re-turn, because, again to my knowledge and I may be wrong, no alternative was costed or otherwise assessed.

So you can't possibly say with any certainty that the cost of one is "huge" or more costly than the other.

Naturally any system that manages unique codes is going to be many times more expensive than maintaining a database of product details.

You willfully ignored the other half of my point - that re-turn would not need to invest in collection trucks or collection staff if collections were to be made- as IWMA proposed - by existing providers. Those are 'huge' costs that would be saved to re-turn.

I stand by my point that you simply don't have enough information to make the necessary cost comparison on which approach would cost less.

I didn't want to get into a long debate here, but I do like discussing and exchanging ideas - so let me please summarise my position.

• I fully agree with you that the IWMA pilot was terrible and could never succeed.
• Notwithstanding that, I disagree that a secure, trustworthy, auditable home-based collection scheme can not be built with existing technology. There is no part of the solution that cannot be built with pre-existing, widely available, easily scalable, mostly low-cost technologies such as QR codes, blockchain, cloud computing and of course physical checks.
• I agree with you that the costs of creating such a system would be considerable, but I disagree they would be prohibitive.
• A DRS scheme that had home collection options would be better for most consumers, for all existing waste management businesses, and for retailers than an RVM based scheme.
• I say we are where we are because an RVM-based scheme is the least worst outcome for producers. I don't think this is coincidence. Of each party impacted - consumers, retailers, waste collectors, producers - they are impacted the least, they have had near zero inconvenience, and for the larger producers, very minor cost arising from the RVM scheme. In time I expect to see no decline in sales, and no decline in SUP production compared to pre-DRS.
• I don't think there is any chance whatsoever that we will move away from the RVM-based model in the foreseeable future, in fact we will probably invent an alternative to SUP before we ever create an alternative to RVMs.

You clearly don't agree with me on these points, but that's OK, we are just two randomers on the internet who - speaking for myself at least - should be getting back to their day job.

How do the 'Communidy' schemes work? I see this bin popped up at my local GAA club.

It says the bin can only be emptied by re-turn vehicles, so I had wondered if re-turn were now collecting single bins from thousands of low volume locations like schools, workplaces and sports clubs. I wondered how re-turn count and sort the contents of these bins and how do they issue vouchers. I even thought this might be the basis of a solution for householders who cannot easily get to an RVM.

Then I copped on.

What must be happening is re-turn only provide a bin and maybe a few posters, and then leave the rest up to the club.

Someone has to open the bin, check its contents, remove any non re-turn items, bring the rest to an RVM, get a voucher, exchange it in store for cash, go to bank and lodge it.

Re-turn then do next to nothing but will boast on their website that they are 'empowering local communities'.

I could be wrong.

Imagine being stuck behind a lad with a 360 litre bin?

As if this scam wasn't torturous enough.