Return Rubbish

Absolutely. Little old Ireland makes no difference when you have the war machine constantly wrecking the planet

Well that's just nonsense though. There are many many products that are treated differently across EU member states.

See cigarettes for one.

If you want an industry to change behaviour you need to hit their bottom line. Whether that is directly or indirectly is irrelevant.

If you start with a DRS with a defined deposit I don't really see whether the deposit is 15 cent or 15 euro is any issue. It's an apartary fee determined to the point of making a difference to the consumers actions.

Not a big stretch to make this kind of thing a public health issue(which it is)

What's the actual difference between the level of fee once you have introduced a mechanism for implementing it?

The issue is these big multinational companies. They are making hundreds of millions profits annually..they have to be forced to change how they do business, but the appetite really isn't there to do it.

We also treat cars very differently than other EU states. There are countless items and practices that are implement and used differently across EU member states.

Fuel, electricity...

I'm not saying anything is an illegal tax, just highlighting that we treat many things differently to other countries. Electric, Fuel and many other products.

My point is, the people who buy these products should be discouraged from same. This to me is obvious. Were that to happen those that produce these products would need to change how those products are packaged and distributed, which is ultimately what is required here.

No I want them to disencentivise the use of plastic bottles.

But we have seen in other countries that demand isn't actually reduced for these types of containers.....the scheme is in fact designed to count the amount of items collected versus sold. That is all.

Again, it's easy to leave certain items out of scope as with the existing scheme.....

Have Coke etc challenged the DRS anywhere?

As I said, nobody is asking for an outright ban.

This scheme as it stands isn't setup to disencentivise the use of these types of containers. Never was the aim. In fact in countries where this scheme has been in place the use of these types of containers has increased.

Suggesting that the only way to reduce the use of these containers is to change the behaviours of those who profit most from their use.

I suppose you can do this directly by vastly increasing the producer fee (some of which will be passed onto the consumer anyway) or changing the behaviour of the consumer, reducing the demand for the product and intimately forcing the company to spend some of their profits on coming up with a more sustainable packaging and transporting solution.

You can ban them outright but that would need to be global and phased in I suppose but as you've said before the money these companies have allowed lobbying of governments on a massive scale.

Thing is we have this DRS scheme setup now..it's simply a matter of increasing the fee.

We've used this before in other areas where we want to disencentivise certain behaviours. You don't have to think too hard for the examples.

You might want to zoom out a bit and read the posts in context.