Deposit return scheme (recycling) - Part 2

Anyone who was previously throwing cans or bottles out their car window won't care about collecting a 15c deposit unfortunately and will still be doing the same thing.

Not sure about that.

I live in the countryside and certain section of road near me was a magnet for empty containers (mostly energy drinks so I reckon dumped by the young contractors in their tractos who mow the fields around here). I counted over 30 empty cans/bottles once in a short section of the road.

Since the scheme came in, the number has reduced dramatically.

If so, result is the same. Less litter.

They already have it in Germany, except in Germany they can just do the bottles at the tills rather than vending machines.

Indeed. Part of a holiday would be getting away from that kind of bullshit.

For a year or two that'll probably be the work around, its most commonly sold in glass bottles anyway.

From August 2026 there is an EU-wide target of 10% of all non-wine drinks being sold in returnable reusable (so, glass bottles; not cans as those are not reusable) containers by 2030, with 40% by 2040

So its extremely likely that the countries like here/Portugal's incoming system that don't have glass in their DRS systems will either add it, or end up with some form of secondary return system in place; and countries without DRS either introduce one or have a glass only system.

Anything standalone would probably be return to a retailer selling that exact product, like what we had from the introduction of glass bottles until it tailed off by the late 80s, basically; and actually how Germany's DRS handles glass bottles now. Those systems are an incredible pain in the arse for consumers.

Systems where any glass bottle can go in any RVM - like Denmark - and it gets returned to the right place (if reused) / recycled (if not) need larger, more complicated RVMs, more back end systems to handle the returns and so on but are no different to the consumer than returning a can.

Just as well re-turn have enough cash to give shops bigger RVMs and pay for the back end sorting if we go down that route!

Was that in Ireland ?

Yes!

That's currently not legal, so its either incompetence or fraud

Very slow way to make dodgy money!

Probably just a POS setting whereby it auto adds 15c to all beverages without specifying if its a DRS container.

Get a receipt next time and bring it up with management. You could be on free coffees for life of you threaten to report them.