Bottle deposits are a terrible system. Store bags full of half-sugary cans (or use much more water rinsing them out beyond a doubt), and foul your hands up before getting groceries (or spend gas on a separate trip), all to effectively recover less than minimum wage? Unless you're drinking some enormous amount of soda or beer, you're better off viewing it as simply another 5 cent tax, and putting them in the standard municipal recycling.
Here in Norway the deposit is closer to USD 0.50 than USD 0.05. I just keep a bag for returnable cans and bottles and all the shops where I return them have disposable wipes so that you can clean your hands after returning the cans and bottles. I don't use any water to rinse out the cans. We just return the bottles and cans about once or twice a month, perhaps a little more often around Christmas.
How do you deal with the bags leaking whatever drips out of the cans, now that you're in the trash hauling business without the standard equipment? Do you have stores that won't take back brands they do not themselves sell, meaning you've got multiple categories of sorting/storing?
10x the deposit would certainly change my personal utilitarian calculation. Which IMHO is a common pattern of failure in the US - only small amounts at stake, a system that sucks because most people just ignore it, and then opposition to making that sucky system more prominent (as my comment was arguing). My viewpoint with respect to cans is probably how large companies perceive dumping waste in a river - the fine is only a $300k line item several years down the road, not worth worrying about!
The sustainability problem that we're facing is much more general, rather than focusing on bespoke solutions for individual categories. A "deposit" is basically just an attempt to price resource depletion into the consumption side, rather than the supply side. IMO it makes sense to move the accounting to the supply side instead of attempting to assign a specific negative cost to every category of good that we don't want incinerated. Tax virgin materials to properly price in the externality of resource depletion, as opposed to increasing deposits to putative levels. If using recycled materials is incentivized enough, it will even start to make sense to pull stuff like aluminum out of the garbage stream.
(PS I've got to wonder whether USians downvoting me even actually return their own bottles for the deposit, or consider it someone else's problem and enjoy having an underclass to salvage recyclables from the unenlightened. I can't imagine many people with tech level salaries care about the nickels.)
Personally I would like both - hit the supply side with tax to ensure all the packaging's hidden costs are on the producer, and a deposit to reduce the amount lost.
I have a habit to take enough bags to the supermarket when shopping, yet I can easily afford the few pennies a new plastic bag costs. My parents had the habit to take items with a deposit - mostly drinks bottles. They didn't need the few coins either.
Considering an old glass pop or milk bottle went round the system 50 or more times, once strikes me as unsustainable madness. As the manufacturer carries none of the consequences, they have incentives to ensure we don't improve. No wonder they consistently lobby against deposit and reuse or recycling schemes.
All shops take all brands. The bag is a big blue IKEA carrier bag, never leaked yet and anyway we don't leave much in the cans and the bottles that have lids (almost all of them) have the lids on.
I really don't know what is so hard about throwing an item into the appropriate trash can, but sure I can't argue with those numbers.
Though there has got to be a better way to incentivize recycling than using human effort to play with singular pieces of trash. Especially one that doesn't end up preying on vulnerable people who don't need the pennies but still ending up hoarding empty cans in their house/car/etc.
There is no better way to incentivize recycling. Single stream has been a failure. Once trash is mixed complicated and expensive separation by humans is necessary. Deposits reduce the amount that get mixed in the first place.
Furthermore I'd go much farther myself. A lower deposit on items that can be easily recyclable. A much higher deposit on plastic items that are hard to recycle in order to push the manufacturer's to make recyclable packaging.
