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Danish deposit system: 93% of bottles and cans are returned and of those, 99.7% recycled (translation in comment)
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- Title
- Danskerne panter i verdensklasse: 99,7 procent af flasker og dåser genanvendes | Nyheder | DR
- Authors
- Line Gjerlev Hobel
- Published
- Mar 12 2025
- Word count
- 164 words
Change the title as it was misleading and hopefully this new one makes more sense too.
For context, the way the deposit system works is that every can of beer or bottle of soda or whatever costs a little bit extra, ranging from 1 kr. to 3 kr. (€0.13 to €0.40) depending on the size of the bottle. It of course makes people want to get that money back. It's a good incentive. Most people keep cans and bottles somewhere at their place and do the depositing when they have a bag or two, which adds up to a lot. A full shopping bag takes like 1 or 2 minutes so it's really easy.
Like the article says, the machine sometimes doesn't work, maybe like 10% of the time in my experience. It's not the machine though, it's a user problem. It breaks because people are idiots and don't fully empty their cans/bottles, so all the sugar or whatever fucks up the machine. They are usually really gross but they do mostly function despite a lot of stickiness - you don't need to touch them though so that's something at least. But yeah, every supermarket and grocery store by law must have machines installed so it's very convenient to return them when you go shopping.
Many US states have bottle deposits, but there's less regulation about requiring stores to have a deposit spot, and the values are unchanged in decades. $0.10 for a bottle is enough to support a few people who will make a living taking the bottles and cans out of people's recycling bins, but it's not an incentive that will make people go out of their way. If every grocery store had a drop-off spot, it might make people more willing to bring them back when they're going shopping.
I'd be curious to see the stats for those states. If there are any?
According to this my state was at 77% redemption in 2023
https://www.bottlebill.org/index.php/current-and-proposed-laws/usa/maine
It looks like this website has stats for other states and Canada too :)
Editing my comment to say that we also have redemption areas you can drop off full bags of bottles rather than using the machines in the grocery stores (which as mentioned above are often gummed up with bad deposits). I can drop off a bag of bottles when I take my garbage out to my rural transfer station and they take care of it for me.
For my current (Colorado) and former (Texas) states, there are no bottle return programs, so stats will likely be non-existent.
In Colorado, the waste bins aren't provided by the local government and are instead through private companies that residents have to seek out on their own, recycling is an optional extra that is not required (most neighbors have the recycling bin, but some do not). We separate waste appropriately, which was then picked up on a bi-weekly basis and sorted by the waste collection center.
For Texas it is largely the same except the municipality provided trash and recycling bins and it was picked up weekly instead of bi-weekly.
In Texas "metal recycling centers" are commonplace where people take various metals to be paid for them by weight. It is a common practice to do so among the poor and homeless population as aluminum pays the most of the common metals and is easy to acquire as there's little to stop someone from picking it out of trash bins, dumpsters, or just picking up litter. It is also commonplace for people, often immigrants or people just trying to make ends meet, to go around the city in their vehicles on "bulk trash" days to pick up the discarded metals from the curb to take to recycling centers for money. As with many things involving individuals, this has positives and negatives depending on the people involved.
Oregon's rate was 90.5% in 2023. We'll probably see the 2024 numbers in April.
Edit: According to the website they also recycle 100% of bottles (even caps).
Interesting, I was completely ready to dispute $.10 not being an incentive, as the last time I had checked, Michigan had a 99% return rate.
Didn't want to be confidently incorrect, so I double checked, and I was right...Five years ago and before then. 2019 / 2020, return rates plummeted to like 75-80%.
As somebody who was working retail at the time, I know COVID messed the whole system up. We wouldn't even accept returns for months, as given the circumstances they were basically biohazards (they always were, honestly). Our distributors weren't even picking them up. Lotta people got into the habit of either throwing them away, or hoarding them and then throwing them away when everything lasted longer than they thought.
Guess I didn't realize that a lot of people must not have gone back to returning them, and just continued throwing them away.
The article is light on details, and the linked announcement doesn't seem to have much more.
I wonder what the main drivers are behind the success of the program. Is it the availability of deposit stations, amount of deposit fee, or cultural expectation? Probably some combination, but it would be nice to see some analysis on that.
In California the redemption values for cans and bottles are 5 or 10 cents, and my impression is that the return centers seem to generally be in alleys behind shopping centers, tucked away where people can't see them. Often the only indication is some handwritten or stenciled sign, nothing that looks terribly official. The last time I went to one I wasn't sure if I handed off my cans to some waste management employee or a homeless person. It doesn't feel like it's worth the effort, so I never visit those, put cans and bottles in my home or public recycling bins, and never receive any return for my deposit. At this point I just consider it a disincentive for single use containers. I remember depositing cans in prominently displayed machines something like 30 years ago, but it seems like that hasn't been a thing for a long time.
Yeah the article kind of assumes prior knowledge which of course the readers of this would be Danes so everyone here knows what it's about. Anyway I found this though that goes in depth about it and I even learned quite a few things myself! Hope it gives satisfying answers to your questions. Seems to me it's more or less a combination of the three in equal extents.
My experience of CRV (California’s deposit recycling program) is that it triggers anxiety and is harder than it needs to be. I have never seen a machine that will take single bottles anywhere. You have to go to the recycling centers which always seem to be either closed or are busy, because people bring their stuff in bulk and need to have it sorted and weighed, so a visit could rather easily take a half hour to complete. I seem to remember not getting paid in cash either, but a grocery store voucher, but that may be a distortion of memory.
Recycle centers I have seen have been universally shabby and unfriendly-looking places. They are often just sheds or even cargo containers. They are very poorly advertised; you are not likely to find them on any business directories, and it’s completely beyond me why they are often behind grocery stores. I found one a while back entirely on accident because I was going behind them to get to the back of goodwill for a donation drop off. And the fact that they don’t check every item, instead relying on a scale, really makes me doubt their accuracy. After all, my CRV deposit is per bottle, not by weight.
The experience is so bad that I don’t use them. I don’t like holding on to trash, and to me the meager payout make up for the time they spend taking up space in my home waiting for the bag to be full, for the hopes and dreams that I will be able to get a whole dollar sometime in the future. But I also don’t buy soft drinks to begin with. The rare times I do, I put them in my home recycle bin, which gives me a negative payback since we pay for that pickup.
Your comment activated a memory for me. I think I had a similar experience as you once. I waited in line behind a grocery store smelling old soda/beer/garbage for 10-15 minutes, distrusted the value determined by weight, and also got a voucher I had to redeem inside the grocery store. I wasn't planning on buying groceries at the time, so I resented being forced to enter a store and wait in line just to get my money.
It takes too much time to be worth the effort, which is probably why it seems like it's very often unhoused people doing it. I've heard people suggest that this is a positive because there is an incentive for people to clean up and and opportunity for people down on their luck to get some income. I think I'd rather have more robust programs for both that doesn't make recycling depend on poor people and poor people depend on recycling.
I've actually been seeing some Danish Coke cans here in Germany for some reason (not in the grocery stores). It surprises me that cans can't be returned in different countries. It seems like it would be simple to work a partnership together. I see that you can return a German can at a Danish machine—although you don't get the Pfand back. It would be nice if you could at least return Danish cans, even if you couldn't get the pant back.