Deposit return scheme (recycling)

Yep. After 25 years of trying to be environmentally responsible in general, including recycling everything I can, I'm out. Every piece of waste will now being going to landfill

Considering how little of our 'recyclables' has actually been getting recycled, your statement about sending everything to landfill is not as bad as it sounds. Which is the worst option?:

• Burn the plastic to fsck, who cares about airborne pollutants (this is what happens to about 70% of our 'recycled' plastic today)
• Pay the cheapest bidder to take it off our hands, where it goes no one knows, but some of it ends up dumped on the side of the road in Asia (the other 30% of our 'recycled' plastic)
• Send it landfill, managed landfills in Ireland

The plastic coming from RVM's may stand a better chance of actually being recycled, but my eyes have been opened to the bollix of 'putting your plastic in the recycle bin'. Reduce sure, Reuse sure, Recycle highly unlikely.

That reflects the views of many decent people who have been doing their best to recycle and paying for it. Unlike the feckers who dumped plastic bags of domestic rubbish on our road today.

It's simply inexcusable and it has to be repeated ad nauseum, that this deposit concept has not been integrated into the existing recycling collection system. A slap in the face for those who have been making the effort. Banana Republic run by Donkeys.

And yes, it is a topic of current discussion among our neighbours in real life.

Give it time as new stock replaces old stock.

Why do you need to give it time?

Was the Old stock not being recycled?

Do we need New stock? Will it be recycled in some way different to the old stock?

Is there some new magic benefit to this new charging system!!

I have used one in Dunnes. There was one person ahead of me... otherwise Ive seen no one using them across multiple retailers.

Bonus points - the item I returned and got 25c back for was bought pre Feb 1st without deposit charged!

Same here but when 100% of stock is replaced we will see more movements

Collection rates were poor and mixed recycling streams are frequently contaminated.

Domestic recycling bins were not working.

They still arent working then for the items still going into them. Maybe we should have tried to fix that?

• Collection rates were poor

How will this make it better....more inconvenient for cents!!

The people littering Dublin (Other Poster) do not care about 15/25cent

• recycling streams are frequently contaminated

What's to stop contamination in this system, It still has mixed Cans, Plastics, and will these machines detect if the inside of a CAN is clean, or has been filled with other crap?

• Domestic recycling bins were not working.

But we should be asking, why it was not working? (If that's even true!). And will the people who cannot use the ease and convenience of a bin outside their own door, really start making an improvement with this system?

Machines won't accept cans or bottles filled with stuff, they know what the target rate is.

Making domestic recycling work in terms of contamination would require a method for continually and forensically issuing hefty fines to those that didn't use their bins properly, which would be hated and inevitably lead to fly tipping as people would avoid using them at all lest they get fined - fly tippers rarely are.

This system works everywhere else it's implemented. Ireland isn't unique enough for it to magically fail here.

is there any country this has been successful in that also has both a sugar tax & minimum unit pricing and where these products are already as expensive?

i'd imagine it's possible a scandinavian country might be as expensive, but people there would generally have a higher standard of living & would be getting ripped off less in many other facets of life.

in tesco, it's currently €1.55 for a reguarl coke, +15 cent deposit

checked german aldi for an example, before the + 15 cent a can of regular coke is only 95 cent.

Denmark and Sweden are already expensive and have been doing this for years.

But this is irrelevant to the scheme actually working. The deposit in many US states is 5c

They don't need sugar tax and MUP to be expensive there, they're already expensive. It has no impact on the return schemes there.

Sugar tax realistically affects one single product - Coca Cola. Everything else on the market has adapted to be exempt. Probably the single most effective 'sin tax' ever introduced - every other product of any scale has reduced its sugar content. MUP only affects canned beer - not the primary source of in scope products.

Stuff already being expensive has no impact on whether this will work regardless.

If various Very Angry Men (like these threads are full of) get pissed off by the scheme and change their consumption habits the scheme has worked absolutely perfectly. A lot of the single use container consumption here is utterly insane. Let them think they've somehow got one over on "the man" by doing exactly what was wanted of them.

Or people are rejecting it

Mention of negative impact on green party politics seems to have hit a nerve. If anyone making changes to avoid Re-Turn actually felt like they're "getting one over on the man" surely there'd be more praise for it on here.

The "Very Angry Men" will probably continue to point out the cons of this scheme for some time no matter how much green fanatics might not like it.