United Kingdom

For our ocean’s sake, we can’t keep kicking the can – or bottle – down the road. We call on the UK government to speed up this law and to follow Wales’s ambition to include plastic, metal and glass.”

The "ocean's sake"?

Glass doesn't float. If it winds up in the ocean, one just gets beach glass.

In fact, we had a place up in California where a beach was being directly used as a dump once. The only remaining stuff, after the metal had rusted away and such, was glass, and it all got turned into beach glass. The state went from trying to stop people from dumping things on the beach to banning people hauling away the beach glass; it had become a tourist attraction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Beach_%28Fort_Bragg%2C_California%29

The thing with bottle deposits is: it really only annoys the people who generally already do the right thing anyway.

Here in the Netherlands, we expanded bottle deposits to cans and small bottles last year. A 15-25 cent deposit.

It’s causing all sorts of problems: deposit machines are breaking down in record numbers and there’s too few of them. A lot of places sell cans and bottles, but a lot of them don’t take returns. This means that it’s a giant hassle to return the cans and bottles, so a lot of people now just see it as a price increase and don’t bother with the return.

The deposit also causes MORE litter in the streets. How? Because we’ve effectively incentivised the homeless and drug addicts to break open trash bins and search for cans and bottles. They break one open, tear out the trashbag, dump the contents and take the bottles. Which attracts rats, since they leave the rest. My city now regularly looks like a garbage dump.

Meanwhile, some call it a succes because ‘there’s fewer bottles and cans on the streets’, while conveniently ignoring literally all the other trash that now gets dumped on it.

I’d honestly vote today to abolish the deposit scheme. Sounds good on paper, but in practice I’m only seeing downsides.

Why is this needed when there is kurb side recycling in the UK?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A UK deposit return scheme for recycling drinks bottles has been delayed to 2027, meaning it will not be in place until almost a decade after it was proposed.

He said the delay was because additional time was needed to synchronise the policy of the devolved administrations in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales with that in England.

The scheme is intended to cut litter on land and sea by paying consumers a small cash sum to return their bottles and cans.

Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, said: “We’ve gone through four prime ministers since the Conservative government first promised a deposit return scheme for recycling bottles.

The Conservatives simply don’t care that plastic bottles end up littering our streets, parks, rivers and seas.

Labour will work across Britain and with business to bring in a deposit return scheme that will stop this waste and clean up our environment.”

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