At the weekend, I passed a family walking down to the local supermarket with a baby in the buggy and another by the hand. Hanging out of the buggy was an enormous bag of plastic bottles and drink cans. “Going to do your weekly recycling chore?” my husband asked. “Isn’t it so annoying?” the mother replied.
Yes, it bloody is. It’s just another annoying chore to fit into your day when we were already religiously adhering to the existing scheme – putting the recyclables into the green bin. Instead, we now having cans and bottles cluttering up the house and are obliged to hauled them off to the supermarket and wait in line to get a voucher to spend in said shop. For people who have to drive to the shop it makes even less sense of course, but green ideas never have to make sense, they just have to seem virtuous.
It goes without saying that recycling is a good idea – though it’s not a new one. Mending and fixing, and passing things onto your siblings or your cousins, and scouring charity shops, was around long before someone decided to make a campaign of it. I completely agree that fast fashion is often unethical and that a throw-away culture is often driven by vanity and materialism, not need, but that doesn’t mean we have to pretend that every Green initiative is wonderful when, in fact, frequently they are nonsensical.
Like many of the Great Climate-Saving Green Diktats, the deposit return scheme was costly to implement and makes life more irritating and expensive when a perfectly good alternative already existed. And now we’ve learned that, despite all the fanfare, the scheme is producing around the same results as the trusty green bins – so its just inconveniencing and annoying us all for no good reason.
RTÉ tells us that: “At least one in four drinks containers sold to customers are not being recycled through the Deposit Return Scheme, latest figures from Re-turn indicate.”
But the story gets worse, as “while the number of drinks containers returned every month has been increasing, the rate at which it is increasing has been slowing down”.
“The figures also indicate that at least one in three containers have not been returned in the combined months of June, July and August, when it was mandatory to sell containers with the Re-turn logo,” the report reveals.
One in three containers have not been returned? Surely that’s no improvement on the rate of recyclables that were being put into the green bin before the scheme began?
According to bonkers.ie, the deposit return scheme was deemed necessary because: “at the moment over 30% of plastic bottles and cans in Ireland don’t make it into the green bin and end up on the ground, in the sea or in landfills”.
But if we’re learning that 33% of containers – one in three – are not being returned, has the situation actually dis-improved? Has making the system more burdensome and fiddly and annoying and inaccessible – as opposed to, you know, just a straightforward lift of the green bin lid – led to a decline in containers being recycled?
That’s not the only negative outcome, though we are, in fairness, just months into the roll-out of the scheme. Over the summer we learned that companies providing waste collection services say they may increase charges for collecting green bins in order to recover “millions of euro” in revenue lost because plastic bottles and drinks cans are being returned elsewhere under the Deposit Return Scheme.
The Independent reported that the waste companies “say the bottles and cans are the most valuable items in household green bins and they are losing millions of euro in sales of these to manufacturers since the DRS began”.
Aluminium cans, which can be recycled indefinitely, are worth €800 to €1,400 a tonne on the recyclable materials market.
PET plastic, which is used in beverage bottles, loses quality the more it is recycled so it is worth less, but at around €500 a tonne is still a valuable material.
It is understood that waste companies are concerned about losing up to €15m a year in this way.
A source for the waste companies told the Independent that the sector couldn’t withstand such a huge drop in revenue. “The industry will have no choice but to increase green bin prices across the State,” they said.
“The department is currently engaging with the Irish Waste Management Association (IWMA) and other stakeholders such as Repak to conduct a robust, evidence-based process to quantify what substantive impact, if any, the introduction of the Deposit Return Scheme will have on the waste collection system in Ireland over the longer term,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Return rate is no better than when bottles were recycled in household green bins.
— Eric Nelligan Aontú (@eric_nelligan) September 7, 2024
All the Return Scheme actually accomplish was an added consumer expense, another quango and jobs for the boys.
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