Deposit return scheme (recycling)

Oddly, my local off-licence is well under 250sqm, but has an RVM inside the door. They’ve obviously decided not to avail of the exception for some reason. There’s a Eurospar right next door that also has a machine, so it’s not out of some sense of civic duty to serve the local community. They must reckon that it will have a positive effect on their balance sheet.

There's a chance it'll actually make them a reasonable bit of side income considering people are likely to return a lot of empties there.

It would make a lot of sense for the Irish craft breweries to arrange a shared single bottle type and do take back/wash/reuse like was done in the past. But it'd need one body to organise it and considering there's already two craft brewery associations I don't think that is going to work.

I said 1 or 2 that are big enough to be required, e.g. 250sqm+. There's a Centra in Ashbourne that used to be a Supervalu for instance, so is definitely big enough.

Some pretty tiny shops have them in Germany, there's a small Rewe in BER airport train station that has two, but I'm not expecting as many here.

My local not particularly big SV has two, but they'd sell a lot of booze. A lot, so plenty of returns to take.

Pure mis-information.

Producers will pay a very small fee towards the admin of the scheme. It is currently set at 1.2c per container, 2c for large bottles.

Only cans with the re-turn barcode have the fee applied.

According to Alupro and numerous other googlable sources, in 2019 irelands aluminum packaging collection and recycling rate was around 79% while the average european rate is around 55%

While there may possibly have been negative changes to that since, there is no reason why they expanded this to cans. As somebody else above mentioned, cans are going to be the more difficult part of this for people as they damage so easily. A sack of plastic bottles you could play football with, coke cans not so much.

I would have applauded this scheme if it had been a double current sized deposit just on plastic, because it would have shown it was about recycling and people could much much more easily have taken part, or at least had a choice of which packaging they bought. Now the choice is gone, you're gonna pay, or you're gonna be inconvenienced. Or probably both because when that can in your bag bends, soz, your deposit is gone. But can they still have it anyway?

July 2023. Repak : Ireland surpasses all recycling targets.

June 2022.Irish Times. Ireland beats 2021 European recycling rate despite covid challenges.

Introduce this just for bottles, i think everybody is on board. We all know its a problem and irish people have proven over the past twenty years we will do the right thing.

Adding cans, you've removed consumer choice to avoid the bad product, taken revenue away from established recycling companies, created unnecessary inconvenience for a significant number of people, will cause bin charges to rise, and put the onus on the people to treat an easily damaged item with kid gloves to get their money back. All this accompanied by a piss poor awareness campaign to the public. And because....hopefully homeless people might pick up most likely damaged and non refundable litter?

I get annoyed thinking of me driving to a place i normally dont visit to get my money back while also paying monthly for my bin company to do this. But apparently im just an old curmudgeon. Then i think of the neighbours.

On my road, there is an 84 year old man who has very poor movement in his hands and is house bound. This is an inconvenience. He has no way to partake without possibly getting a taxi to a machine or shop and hoping somebody might assist. He can least afford this.

There is also a woman in her late seventies who permanently cares for her fifty ish year old severely disabled son. She cannot leave him alone. This is an inconvenience. She can drive to an rvm, but this involves getting her son ready for that trip, a notable amount of time. She can least afford this.

Both houses use online shopping. In a road of 12 houses.

Scam scam scam scam. We are being financially and / or time inconvenienced in order to pay for the creation of the body whose sole purpose is to insist we should be unnecessarily inconvenienced.

I honestly couldnt give a damn what germany does with similar schemes. When this was introduced in Germany, ireland had already began to go down a different path and that path proved to be really succesful, with the exception of bottles. Shameful move by this new quango which can serve only to do long term cause damage to the general public perception on recycling, the cost of living generally and the future investment by genuine waste management companies. 

There is absolutely nothing good about this set up.

Do you think the fella firing cans out the car window will now go and stop off at the shop to get his 15c back? I certainly don't.

Lets get real, this is a scheme for the compliant.

23% of "On THE GO" plastic bottles are recycled. I feel that figure is made up or is being guessed from the amount of plastic sent for incineration or land fill which is a choice of the waste management company, not the Irish public.

https://www.breakingnews.ie/explained/explained-what-is-the-new-deposit-return-scheme-and-how-does-it-work-1581608.html

@thomas 123 impossible really to know.

i have a question: if there's a shop a person does not like, is it better to bring back the bottles there to their RVM? or would that be doing them a favor?

The reason i ask this is because i read 2 pieces of conflicting information somewhere. 1 may be untrue im not sure

1) somewhere i recall seeing that the store makes 2.2 cent off of each return.

2) somewhere else someone said that if a store does not reach 500,000 in the first year they get given 3000€ grant for free! and then after the second year if they still have not reached that number of returns, then an additional €2000 they get from re-turn, and for the 3rd year if they still don't reach that many, then an additional 1000

It’s on this document under “Additional Financial Supports”

https://re-turn.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Retailer-Handling-Fees-Update-July-2023.pdf

Once they have the ReTurn logo - they can be returned anywhere, but the refund you get from the machine needs to be spent in that store. Or redeemed in that store for cash.

RVM locator on the website isn't working at all for me. Bit of a **** up for day one