[stevekemp]

>Why not an incentive when people return used bottles or others wastes ?

Some countries do that. Notably Finland and Sweden. When you buy a can of coke, or a glass bottle of beer, there is a small surcharge added to the price. When you return the empty container you receive your money back.

People discard cans/bottles in parks, at bus-stops, and people make a living collecting them and claiming the money back.

https://www.sitra.fi/en/cases/deposit-based-recycling-system...

[fishnchips]

In Poland (perhaps all of the Soviet bloc?) it’s always been a thing. I remember collecting them as a kid, competing against local drunks. It was hard to find one back then. These days they’re too cheap for most people to care.

[LeonidasXIV]

Also, Poland has a huge share of bottles that are not returnable, which is very different from Germany or the Nordics where all the bottles have deposit on them, even plastic ones.

(Whether you are able to return them is a different question, because the Danish system allows vendors to reject bottles that they aren't selling themselves, which is something Germany was quick to outlaw)

[kwhitefoot]

Also Norway. Typically close to 10 percent of the purchase price is a returnable deposit.

A few cans and bottles are discarded but the vast majority are returned because it is so easy to do; almost every supermarket has a machine that accepts the bottles and cans (including those not sold in that shop), crushes them, and prints a ticket that you can redeem at the checkout.

[leoc]

Elsewhere there were privately-run bottle-deposit schemes until relatively recently. One was active in Scotland until only 2015: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-33985022.

[stevekemp]

I spent years collecting and returning those glass bottles, and to this day maintain that Irn-Bru tastes better from a glass bottle than a plastic one!

I had no idea the program had stopped, but I guess it must have been around the time I left Scotland.