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by Mirioron 2109 days ago
>The natural progression of this is to create large plastic bootle/container deposits. Again this will never happen because it obviously stops the current externalization of costs in the plastic business.

We already have that in a lot of EU countries. Every soda bottle has an additional deposit cost (10 cents) on top of the soda itself. You pay that when you purchase it and get the 10 cents back when you take the bottle to a collection point for plastic bottles.
2 comments
tallanvor 2109 days ago
But even then, you often aren't returning the plastic bottles to be reused anymore, instead they're just recycled. --When I first moved to Norway in 2008, the soda bottles actually were collected, cleaned, and reused, but they stopped doing that, and now they're only recycled. --It's better than them ending up in landfills or being burned for energy, but as has been noted, plastic can only be recycled so many times, so it still ends up causing more plastic to be manufactured.
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DoingIsLearning 2109 days ago
> We already have that in a lot of EU countries

Citation needed?

There are many glass deposit schemes, but apart from Norway and maybe Germany, other EU countries' _plastic_ deposit schemes to my knowledge are either draft proposals or rejected draft proposals? What exactly do you mean by a _lot_ of EU countries?

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insanebits 2109 days ago
Here in Lithuania we have like 90% of plastic bottles have a deposit logo on them, pretty much all of the soda, beer, water, milk bottles are recycled. Most of the non recycleable bottles are from outside of EU brands, and those are generally more expensive. Collection points are also automated, where you put them on conveyer kind of belt ant it uses OCR to detect if the bottle can be recycled. Those collection points are attached to a store and you get a credit in associated store which can be used to either buy groceries or jus get your money in cash.
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Mirioron 2109 days ago
>In Europe, 10 countries have implemented programs, with return rates ranging between 82% in Estonia and 98% in Germany.

https://plasticsmartcities.org/products/deposit-return-progr...

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