It’s Not Easy Being Green

Patrick Ryan reviews the good, and mostly bad of the first six months of the country’s recycling scheme for drinks cans and bottles and offers some solutions on what needs to be improved. 

Since its launch just over six months ago Ireland’s Deposit Return Scheme has seen approximately 350 million cans and bottles returned to Reverse Vending Machines (RVMs) in shops, off-licences and supermarkets across the country.

Has the programme been a success? The numbers suggest yes, but with a 15c or 25c charge on every empty under the “polluter-pays” principle, the numbers engaging with the project were always going to look impressive.

We’re collecting about two-thirds of the 5 million or so cans and bottles we glug every day, but we must embrace recycling with a fervour that would leave Greta Thunburg green with envy if we’re to separate and collect 77% of our single-use plastic beverage bottles – the figure member states agreed with the EU – which increases to a whopping 90% by 2029.

In that case this “closed-loop recycling system”, ensuring old cans and bottles get turned back into new cans and bottles again and again, without losing their properties, makes sense.

Is Re-Turn, the non-profit company based in Dublin 22 and charged with setting up and running the scheme, containing representatives of producers from eight Irish organizations: RGDATA (The Retail Grocery Dairy & Allied Trades Association); Musgraves; Tesco; Britvic; Heineken; Diageo; Clada, and Coca-Cola, winning hearts and minds?

The answer to that is no, or at least not yet. From the launch last February 1st serious problems arose, most of which were predictable, and almost all of which the company dismisses as minor, and quickly solved. Six months on many remain.

Beverages without the required barcodes weren’t recognized by the RVMs, and it was unclear how these were to be refunded prompting retailers calling RTE’s Liveline to report that a list of anywhere between 50 to 700 items found on their shelves couldn’t be processed, including popular products that originated in the UK. Even cans from Coca-Cola which some small shops and takeaways had been sourcing in Denmark, weren’t accepted, sparking a complaint to the EU from the Irish Petrol Retailers Association that this breached anti-competition laws.

Re-Turn failed to convince doubters ready to declare the scheme a stealth tax or a cynical attempt at “greenwashing”, suspicions reinforced when it emerged that on a given day one in seven of the 2,000 or so machines nationwide were offline.
Public confidence wasn’t helped when the Irish Mirror published correspondence obtained under Freedom of Information showing that behind-the-scenes management of the system was like a scene from the Keystone cops.

Emails pinged back and forward from various departments, and at least nine government ministers attempted to find out basic information like what happens to unreclaimed deposits, and who was responsible for maintaining the vending machines. The company also provoked public ire by refusing to reveal staff salaries, a move historically guaranteed to raise resentment among the masses.

The scheme has also meant some retailers had to install new software to participate.
Cork Councillor Noel McCarthy, who will contest the looming general election for FG, runs an off-licence in Fermoy and is firmly in the camp of the unimpressed, telling the Examiner earlier this year that the changeover to Re-Turn is causing serious problems for his business and is obliging him to spend €7,000 on his computer system.

The machines themselves are also expensive, at about €12,500 apiece and although over 40% of this is reclaimable through grants over three years (for stores handling below a quarter of a million cans and bottles a year) the scheme is still proving costly for smaller retailers like Caomihe Kavanagh, who runs a SuperValu in rural Kilkenny.

She recently explained to the Sunday Times that her shop must cover €50 each month for maintenance after the 12-month warranty ends, provide Wi-Fi for the RVM’s to run, and task staff to empty them.
Kavanagh’s returns on her Re-Turn? “For the month of March, I got €22.53,” she said

Overall 80 percent of empties are now accepted, which is encouraging. However, with retailers experiencing such problems it’s hardly surprising many shops are not signing up to bring more RVMs to our communities.

Some supermarkets in Dublin seem to be paraphasing Elvis with a refrain of return to vendor, barcode unknown, advising you to go to a rival for a refund, while other machines will not accept containers bought in others’ stores, or in the case of Tesco another of their own branches.
“In that instance, we’ve asked them to work with the retailer – we’ve asked the retailers to pay them the deposit and then claim it back from us,” Re-Turn Chief Executive Ciarán Foley admitted to RTE’s Claire Byrne, stressing that such problems were rare and were quickly sorted out.

Tesco isn’t the only giant struggling with the system. Lidl’s vouchers mysteriously carried expiration dates, an embarrassing solo run that was not part of Re-Turn and which the chain was forced to address in-store. Social media also carries accounts of unscrupulous retailers who’ve engaged in blatant price gouging.

While for many consumers the Deposit Return Scheme is an inconvenience for the elderly and the disabled it’s a huge challenge.
Safety concerns also arise. People searching bins for discarded containers are exposed to broken glass, syringes, and other biohazards, as well as vermin looking for food.

This was surely predictable, but the trays fitted on German bins are only now being added here, allowing consumers to leave containers on the sides for others, such as the homeless, to safely recycle.

In contrast, waste disposal firm Panda had to warn employees they were not to take out bottles collected in their green bins and recycle them back through in-store machines.

The temptation for the public when RVMs won’t work is to simply dump their containers beside them, defeating the object of the exercise, and making them less likely to bother trying to recycle next time, and where machines are accessible, at busy times lengthy queues are common.
Kilmainham-Inchicore is reasonably well served by the system, but it depends on where in Dublin 8 you live, and some among our 20,000 population face a long walk, or a tricky trip on a bus with a bin bag full of empties to get to the likes of Kilmainham’s Eurospar or Lidl in Thomas Street.

Should we use the car? Well not if you don’t have one, and even if you do, isn’t the whole purpose of this scheme to help drastically cut greenhouse gasses? At the recent COP28 talks the EU urged citizens to make every effort towards keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, and Brussels now pledges to cut 90% of our collective emissions by 2040.

Guzzling a litre of petrol to take the bottles of Fanta your family quaffed over the last few days for recycling hardly helps, a problem doubled when your crate of containers has to be taken home again, and brought back once more because the supermarket’s Wi-Fi is dodgier than Paul McGrath’s knees.

Apart from the obvious question of how OAPs and people with mobility issues are to get their bags of cans and bottles to a recycling machine, how are residents in small, cramped houseshares or tiny apartments supposed to store containers that if dented, or crushed to save space, or with damaged barcodes, will be rejected?

Ironically Re-Turn stops recycling, and this may well come with a price tag for the taxpayer.
With fewer consumers using the green bin at home for their old drink containers there’s less waste for companies recycling the empties, and there’s gold in them thar’ cans – or at least good money – with aluminum worth anywhere from €800 to €1,400 a tonne.
Even humble PET plastics used for drink bottles can be €500 a tonne, resulting in a loss of millions per year to those companies, the money instead going into, or rather coming out of, the Re-Turn machines.

The Irish Waste Management Association’s spokesman Conor Walsh confirmed to the Irish Independent that his organization was in discussions with the Department of the Environment about the effect of this on members’ income and some sources have claimed in the press that either subsidies or higher bin collection charges, could be the result.

Perhaps we need to think outside the box, literally. Why didn’t this happen from day one, as Norway and Germany for example offer case studies in good practice? While the Re-Turn website is bright, easy to navigate and useful, it doesn’t offer answers to many questions.
More is needed. A smartphone app on the side of household green bins linked to users’ accounts could register barcodes, which would also solve the problem of bringing back bags of bottles and cans for most elderly and disabled customers.

Similar apps could be used to check whether a container would return a refund, or could be recycled in the old method. Similarly, there is no system to gift your refund to a charity, something easily done with a new-generation QR code on home green bins linked to a bank account.

Although Norway has been recycling for 100 years, Germany remains the poster boy for such initiatives in the EU. 98.4% of cans and plastic bottles come back through their Deutsche Pfandsystem Gmbh, which reduces litter, increases recycling, and makes the public far more conscious of sustainability.
The country also uses its Packaging Act which has ambitious targets for even more recycling and mandatory charges for companies to reduce waste, including a Central Packaging Register on which every German company must be listed.

Clearly, although good things have already been achieved through such programmes abroad our expensive system leaves much to be desired. It’s like ordering an Audi and being left with a Lada.

Real issues remain, failures far more than the teething problems suggested by Re-Turn’s spokespersons.
As any marketing expert or psychologist will tell you the customer must be positive about and emotionally engaged with any product or service. If this feeling is missing, or worse still if the public is suspicious or resentful towards it, you are deader than disco.
While it’s unrealistic to expect the initiative to become a roaring success from the start, for mass recycling to become a normal part of the day-to-day routine in Inchicore or on Inishmore the system needs to be simple to use, easy to access, and transparent.

Ireland showed in the past with its plastic bag tax and smoking ban that we are willing to embrace a newer, healthier future if green initiatives are managed correctly and sensibly.

Along with Ireland and Germany 13 other EU countries operate Deposit Return Schemes, with Austria, Cyprus, Poland, Portugal, and Hungary set to launch their initiatives next year though there is resistance in some southern European nations.

When it comes to recycling and lowering greenhouse gasses and cutting environmental emissions failure is simply not an option – for any of us.