Deposit return scheme (recycling)

I'm not defending waste collection companies here for a second as they have been the bane of my life recently since moving house with non collections, no customer service etc. However they cannot control what people put in their recycling bins.

The GPS tracker you mentioned, I'm sure his bin was perfectly clean and all material was recyclable but who's to say his neighbours took the same care. There could have been all sorts of contaminants mixed in with his bin in the truck from people around him not recycling properly and contaminating the entire waste load.

I may be living in hope that the scheme helps increase effectiveness of recycling but I'd rather that than knowing for certain that my cans in my green bin are ending up in Ringsend.

This is what's happening in Drogheda at the moment, the dog waste bins are being removed, seemingly because they're too full and they couldn't be bothered emptying them. How any county council can remove bins and then whinge about litter is beyond me.

Agreed. The EU leave it up to the member state to create a bespoke system to suit their needs (like you mention our small market) and plan for any country specific issues. Problem is in the EU a transposed directive is only challenged on a reactionary basis by EU citizens. So politicians (chancers) of the ilk we produce are basically left unsupervised and they know it. And here we are. An Ireland round the corner half job special. Re-Turn:

The whole issue of contamination is a big fallacy, don't know if it's return pushing this message, but it's been mentioned a few times on thread and it's simply not true.

While somebody putting wrong materials in the recycling is an issue, it is not anywhere near the issue being indicated. I know this because many many years ago I worked on a recycling picking and sorting line in one of the major waste companies and they are set up to deal with this. Something horrible like a nappy might cause the few items it touches to end up going to landfill, but the idea that one bad bin can wreck a whole street or trucks worth of material is a blatant lie.

From hands on experience i can say that what I saw was that 95% of what went into recycling bins was put there with the best intentions, and probably 85% plus of the material was recoverable. Yes, occasionally something horrible would appear, but that just went through the process and into general waste while everything around it was recovered with no issue.

It is not in the interests of waste companies to landfill valuable materials. In fact, the company i worked for had fascinating tech in place to recover not just from the recycling bins, but also to recover material such as metal, paper, plastic, soil and stone from general waste too, though that was a lot more difficult to do of course.

If some waste companies are sending all material to landfill or incineration, that's an issue the government could have taken up with the waste companies through legislation. While i can see why there may be negative opinions about waste companies, and no doubt some are dodgy, many of them are doing things 100% right and have been all along.

Contamination of domestic bins is another spoof being pushed to try to justify this system. I personally put it at the same level as the hoardes of homeless people who will apparently pick up litter for the return fee, aka absolute scutter. 

Oddly, that's probably the best option for it from an environmental POV. People think the plastic just magically reappears once it's recycled, forgetting the fossil fuels and water that are used in order to recycle it. That's if it's a recyclable plastic and assuming it hasn't been recycled too many times. Glass and aluminium, for context, are infinitely recyclable.

Where are these machines? Probably not needed in Ireland yet given the very low level of in scope products we currently have on our shelves with deposits

The re-turn rules are that the vouchers need to be redeemed in the shop they are issued in. If a shop is happy to extend the voucher to other shops in the chain that's up to them.

There's no need to be angry if some shops want to give more flexibility on the vouchers. You can always exchange for cash and use the cash wherever you want

The Dutch scheme isnt comparable. It was introduced in phases with large bottles first, then years later smaller bottles, then cans. To the best of my knowledge they are the only country that have tried it this way and talking to companies in the Netherlands it was a terrible idea.

The DRS scheme takes the bottles out of the incineration channel. The producers get the plastic back and get it recycled. Incineration would make zero sense to them.

Sweden, Germany,

Very good 👍

One of them at the civic amenity site would be very handy.

I don't think you got the message about why this type of thing isn't an issue in Germany and indeed the logic of it working somewhere else means that it will here too.

What this means is that I have to go out of my way to go to the most popular shop to recycle bottles so I can use them in the shops most used. It's annoying I have to do this(or q up as you suggest, cause ppl have time for that🙄) when other stores have flexibility. It makes it hard to teach youngsters to recycle when the happy at the end is unnecessarily difficult.

The stuff that got rejected dis it get manually checked by a human or just dumped.

Yay, my own machines! 😄