• FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    It’s interesting that your return rate for cans is worse than for bottles.

    There’s actually an interesting historical reason for that. We’ve had bottle deposit here since the days of glass bottles. The bottles would be sold, consumed, brought back, cleaned and refilled. Glass is great for that. The bottle deposit was generally set at 1 guilder. This was the currency we used before the Euro.

    If you did your weekly shopping in say, 1995, you’d return your bottles and get a ticket. If you returned 10 bottles, that would be 10 guilders. Now, a FULL cart of groceries for a decent sized family would cost you a 100 guilders max in those days. So that bottle deposit took a nice chunk off that grocery bill. As a result, we had and still have a large percentage of bottle returns. It’s ingrained in people to bring back those large bottles since they’ve always done it.

    Now, with cans… there’s a bit of a problem. The deposit for large bottles is 25 cents, but the deposit for cans and small bottles is 15 cents. That’s not a whole lot, especially considering how much the price of groceries has skyrocketed. Basically, the bottle deposit isn’t really a good incentive in terms of monetary value. It only really makes sense if you collect larger amounts of them, like the homeless.

    They ARE planning to increase the bottle deposit - make it 50 cents in fact - as a way to incentivize people to bring them back. That will ‘probably’ work to an extent, but most people dislike the system for other reasons than the monetary value. And if those other issues aren’t fixed, raising the bottle deposit only annoys them further.

    • lud
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      2 months ago

      Here, the deposit is either 1 SEK (0,09€) or 2 SEK (0,17€).

      Cans and small PET bottles are 1 SEK and large PET bottles are 2 SEK.

      I’m personally of the opinion that we should make the deposit bigger because we might as well. We have had the current system for some years now and inflation obviously makes the deposit less each year.

      And since the majority of people already deposit their bottles it wouldn’t affect them much at all and fuck the people that still refuse to deposit their bottles. Win win.