the real "solution" is reducing use, not recycling, and re-use, not recycling. Recycling is what should happen with what's left over after the other two "Rs" (remember the 3 R's?).
Instead the plastics industry says "use as much plastic as you want, we'll pretend to recycle it" and everyone pretends that it's actually happening, and it's not. I think that's called "green washing"
This is a specious claim with an unjustified goal. Municipal waste management is not expected to be “cost effective”. We don’t need to recycle because it’s profitable, we need to recycle to reduce plastic production and plastic waste.
Of course we need to reduce demand, you’re right. We need to avoid plastics in the first place, and that should be higher priority than recycling.
But there’s nothing wrong with the idea of recycling. Yes, today’s recycling is not happening as advertised. But that’s not because recycling doesn’t work, it’s because people aren’t doing it. It’s a social problem we have, not a process problem.
The three Rs were in order of priority but because reduced consumption didn't exactly translate into what works for a sustainable economy under current incentive paradigms almost anywhere in an economy with lots of consumption we kind of wound up with the least important of the guidelines being what we could more reliably practice (the reasons are another discussion entirely).
Almost all the most pressing problems for the human species seem to be Wicked Problem classes and it's part of why I don't have a lot of expectation that any of them will be solved even _if_ catastrophic events like constant war and mass deaths happen. I also have doubts that whoever survives any of these kinds of events would be more genetically predisposed to solving these problems in the future either.
This has been a thing in Michigan and likely a few other states for decades, although with a 10 cent bounty at least 10-20 years ago. There was apparently a 90-95% recovery rate last I checked, but I'm not sure how reliable those statistics are.
That still doesn't solve the problem of recycling plastics or bottles in general, which this research may advance.
The ten cent deposit has been in place in Michigan since the 1970s. Back then ten cents was a big deal but over 500% inflation since then has eaten away at the incentive. What has changed is attitudes regarding recycling and waste disposal in general. Back when Michigan put the deposit in place, it made a very noticeable difference in the reduction of litter in Michigan and also in how litter compared to states without a deposit. From my purely personal experience, that difference is mostly gone now.
People hauling empties all over the place doesn't seem as eco friendly as it once did, especially when so many people have recycling pickup curbside with their trash pickup. In deposit states, you can't crush your cans before returning them but in non-deposit states you can, saving space. Eliminating the deposit probably would result in some amount of plastic going into trash cans instead of recycling bins, but it would be very far from being 100%. The math gets fuzzy when you start deciding on if people make special trips to return empties or are they usually returning them when they already were going to the store to shop. Same the more upstream you go. But that recycling bin at the curb is still there, waiting to be used more.
this has 2 major consequences: it invites homeless people to pilfer through the trash - often throwing it down without cleanup. secondly, it invites people to take bottles from outside the jurisdiction of the reward and "redeem" them. Thus stealing money from the program.
In practice, number 1 really never happens in Sweden. Sure, there are people looking for bottles in public trashcans, but they are not exclusively homeless nor do they leave a mess behind after collecting any potential recyclables from the cans. Private trashcans don't really contain recyclables as everyone collects what containers they buy and redeem them at the store when going to buy groceries. Number 2 doesn't happen either because the bottles have to have barcodes that actually grant the reward, which foreign containers do not.
This problem is noticeable here in Amsterdam too -- homeless people tend to just take the whole garbage bag out of the can, and empty it on the sidewalk so that it's easy to spot and collect all statiegeld (deposit) cans and bottles.
It looks like the best solution the municipality has managed to come up with so far is to attach metal cupholder-like thingies to new trash cans, and people are expected to put statiegeld bottles and cans there, so that others can take them later and get a refund. Though I don't know how a regular uninformed person is supposed to figure out what these cupholders are for -- it's not intuitive at all.
Around here they're polite and don't make a mess. But on the flip side you could only go around making a mess so long before you got beat up or something and good luck getting a police response for that so it's probably not in their interest to be obnoxious.
