Back from a wonderful Paddy’s weekend, we can’t help but think of this one as the last without our own DRS! Next year, our fellow European ‘Depositeers’ visiting us will not only celebrate the banishing of serpents but of all plastic and aluminium beverage containers from our streets. Ireland is now part of this great club of European countries with a DRS. The system is simple enough: a deposit is placed on top of the price of all PET plastic bottles and cans at point of sale. Your deposit will be redeemed when you return your empty container/s to any shop or return point – simple!
So simple we don’t even need to understand the language it’s explained in:
The DRS holds many advantages, one being the enhanced segregation of waste preventing PET bottles and cans from being contaminated by other types of waste. We all have our recycling bins and it’s great that so many of us use them but still, contamination happens quite often in this system. This has the effect of degrading the material in terms of its ability to be recycled, but also impacts the value of the materials on the recycling market.
An interesting feature of European countries without a DRS is that they often have rather poor recycling rates of plastic beverage packaging: 62% in Ireland, 45% in Portugal and 47% in Franc But by introducing a DRS with its associated reverse vending machines and collection points, this issue is avoided completely and the collection rates sky rock.
Deposit return schemes are not new. Not only did they exist in our own national past for glass bottles – ask anyone over the age of 45 – but other European countries have had them implemented for decades. It is based on their experience, and the years of measurements & statistics gathered, that we can safely say that the DRS works and is the most effective collection system around. This, in turn, leads to higher recycling rates but, with the system duly tweaked, can also lead to higher rates of re-use, ach sin scéal eile!
The oldest extant system in Europe started in 1989 in Iceland, shortly followed by the Swedish one that launched theirs 1984. They respectively reach 91% and 88% collection rate for the targeted containers. It’s worth noting here that, although 88% seems like a lot, it would leave us short of the 90% collection rate that the EU’s Single Use Plastic Directive demands of member states by the end the decade.
Germany also sets a strong example being the most populated country having a DRS with 83 million citizens taking part in it since 2003. Their collection rate, being the highest in all Europe with 98% collection rate of PET bottles, aluminium containers and glass bottles, shows how achievable, effective and popular recycling can be.