The new recycling system

Was in Tesco earlier and they had reduced a load of drinks in plastic bottles, water, soft drinks etc. The sign said it was reduced because of the deposit scheme. I presume they want to sell off all the old stock and that's their own business.

But I went into the off licence part to buy some beer and they had stock reduced there too for the same reason. But this was on the boxes of glass bottled beer, the ones with 12 or 16 in a box.

Surely they know glass bottles aren't included.

Because we are two weeks in and in the transition phase. Of course there are teething problems. Like any new project. It’s been running for 20 years in Germany.

Opinion poll here. The headline would suggest re-turn is already a big hit, but don't read that headline in isolation.

Because a 'big majority' were recycling before, close to the 71% "will support" found here. Also 71% might be a majority, but it's a good bit off the 90% target, and the 98% in Pfandland.

Some of the sentiment reported reflects dissent in this forum, it's not just internet cranks who are disillusioned.

The 21% of don't knows will be where our target is met or lost; to meet the target the vast majority of them will need to engage.

I predict a 2027 doubling of deposit values, (30c / 50c) to force compliance, as at that stage it will be clear we are not on course for 90%. The only available tool re-turn has is the deposit value.

PS Newstalk don't seem to have been given the re-turn media asset pack, their images are obviously stock / generic.

Ive used the German system. It's simpler than the one here.

Why did they not start adding the RePak logo to bottles and cans a year ago?

Why do you think that! Our local rural bottle bank is well placed for the neighbours to be watching what's going on!

But...but.. you'll screw up Mr.Foley's statistics. And he'll get very upset and have to invent some other metric by which to declare success and keep his cushy salary.

You'll see the manufacturers, distributors & retailers all squeal very hard if they try to push the deposit up to force compliance. Jobs on the line etc

Whatever transition period would have avoided the screwups happening at the moment leading to people being incorrectly charged deposits and lots of stuff being dumped in regular bins cos the machine rejects them.

The highly paid staff at Re-turn doing a great job justifying their quango arent they?

The idea of a longer transition is on the face of it an attractive one.

It's something we haven't discussed in detail.

I'm left wondering why they didn't go for it or was it ever considered.

If the machines were live for a long period with no deposit and consumers could still throw the containers in the green bin who would bother with the RVM ?

Simpler in that you have to remembers which shop sold you certain items cause they can't go back anywhere?

I don't consider that simpler...

They also have, I believe, six different deposit rates rather than two; and charge 25c on conventional cans/PET bottles.

I'm not sure people would bother over a long, say 6 to 9 month period just for the sake of an experiment with a "reward" of 2c.

The stock changeover seems to be causing the main headache and that would have to happen anyway at some point.

If it wasn't for the 500 and whatever barcodes things might have gone much better.

I was looking forward to just old stock with no deposit and new stock with deposit on the shelves beside each other for a few months.

The 500 + barcode issue was the wildcard that complicated things.

Almost equivalent. I keep hearing "we pretty much copied the German model", pretty much and almost equivalent.

Bottom line is, we didn't copy the German model, we 've re-invented the wheel. The RVMs are not the ones they use in Germany. They don't accept a crate of bottles. They don't accept glass, so you have to take your glass bottles elsewhere.

That's not what RePak said around the launch date. It's only because a huge number of products have had a deposit charged on them that they switched to using the barcode. The original plan had been for the machine to check for the repak logo. And if you are correct and the logo does nothing, then why put a logo on to begin with?

The longer the transition the more the room for confusion. A number of schemes went for hard start dates. That involved producers uplifting product and there was no way the producers here were agreeing.

The 4 month transition was a compromise, particularly for the beer companies who needed a longer one. Soft drink companies tend to have shorter delivery schedules.