Alice Fiverston | Container recycling schemes should go back to the future

Countless calendars cast aside as capricious and conceited caitiff Coca-Cola corrupted the citizenry to conserve and covet its continued capital count. My English teacher always told me to have a strong opening. Though I was probably also told, “There is a limit to the value of alliteration, Alice.”

Anyway, South Australia got in early with a ‘container deposit scheme’ whilst Thomo and Lillee were listening to disco but then the rest engaged in a bullshit argument for yonkies about the merits of an expanded or nationwide scheme with Coke and others lobbying hard against it. Wasn’t until 2012 that any other State switched to Pepsi and started doling out the dosh.

But like disco being dead much has changed since 1977 and ‘Cash for Cans’ is no longer an environmental achievement and is a significant barrier to more effective and radical action being taken in the world of consumer sustainability. I believe the solution lies in even more nostalgic times, back when your Grands bumped uglies to Ella Fitzgerald, and also in a re-examination of a three word slogan.

‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.’ Like ‘Stop the Boats,’ ‘Axe the Tax,’ and ‘Jobs and Growth’ the order of the original three words has an important purpose. Best environmental outcomes are achieved where overall material usage is reduced, silver goes to reusing, and recycling is the guy whom no one remembers standing next to the Olympic civil rights protesters.

All a container deposit scheme does is support recycling which in 1977 probably needed all the help it can get, kind of like our cricket team after Thomo and Lillee retired. But in the today time household recycling has been universally accepted for quite a while. Many other public spaces also provide recycling bins. Which leads me to suspect that the expanded schemes are no longer improving environmental outcomes, i.e. shit would’ve gotten recycled anyway.

So what’s the solution? What’s my point? Why is it taking me so long to get to it? I’m sure as hell not advocating for Reducing because I like my choccy milks and I like me beers, usually in the order opposite to which I’ve listed them here as choccy milk is a criminally underrated hangover cure. But please drink responsibly.

Which leaves us with reusing. Taking a beer bottle and going through 17 steps to end up with another beer bottle seems rather redundant to me (basically South Park’s ‘cash for gold’ episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uhiUnavxTk). Bottles used to be reused probably until companies did some maths and realised they could simply externalise some ‘costs’ as the consumer’s rubbish and move to single use. So let’s move back to a closed system. Beer gets made, gets put in bottle, I buy bottle with costs for reverse distribution/deposit scheme built in, I drink beer, I return bottles to store and get my additional cost back. Empties then get collected and returned as part of the distribution system ready to again have their insides blessed by beer.

YTBAQ (Yet To Be Asked Questions)

Does this idea have gaping flaws? To which I say, isn’t that the point of this blog? 

What about cans? Yeah, you can’t refill a can. But the trend towards cans could possibly be reduced as cost of reusing bottles may be less.

What about smaller brewers? Yeah, there’s probably issues with barriers to entry though if they’re stocked in bottle shops they’ve still got some sort of distribution system which could possibly be adapted. People can also take empties straight to the brewery as the whole thing requires standardised bottles (probably should’ve mentioned that earlier).

What about things that aren’t beer? Well, yeah, I’ve gotten a bit captured by the beer thing in attacking the scheme as a whole but you got to follow your heart.

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Per tradition, some tasty appetisers…

…my suggestion which many economists would also like: tax the things you don’t want at the source (burning fossil fuels, smelting new aluminium, making new plastic bags, chopping down trees, discharging pollution in the river, etc.) and let the market figure out the most efficient way to respond to that. This would encourage all 3 rhyming words in the environmental “re* triad”: bottle re-use schemes could make sense without even needing to legislate for it.

Why not do away with bottles altogether? Breweries could install outlets (or “teats”) in their external walls, so thirsty patrons could simply slip on a hygienic single-use sheath, have a drink and carry on down the street. You could (but probably shouldn’t) market it as “slip, suck, spew”.

Finally, Rhea Worded responds…

Turning to one of the great things that Keating had something to do with apart from our now universal love of antique French clocks and Mahler, the Productivity Commission has looked into container deposit schemes (CDS) in 1991 and again in 2006. Attempting to synthesise the fairly partisan research presented by both sides of the CDS debate they concluded that container deposit schemes are only the most efficient option economically speaking if the cost of illegal disposal is high – read containing toxic substances. They found that kerbside recycling and general anti-litter programs were more effective in diverting bottles to reuse and recycling.

As usual, governments gubernational or otherwise indulged these inquiries by ignoring their findings and hence I find myself agreeing with Alice’s appraisal of the current situation. That said, can we safely say that because we aren’t doing something anymore that the good old days were better? Why did we give up on reusing bottles and start smashing them up just to reform them into an identical shape?

On page 211 of the PC’s report there is a fascinating table that shows that South Australia, already good at what you propose – that is reuse of refillable bottles – got even better in the period between the CDS introduction in 1976 and the late ‘80s. The reason for this is that the CDS used to discriminate between refillable and single-use bottles being 15c and 4c back in each case.

Since then though things went pear-shaped. First was a High Court decision being Castlemaine Tooheys Ltd vs. The State of South Australia which ruled this distinction unconstitutional removing the even-at-that-point small incentive to preference refillable containers. 

Second beverage manufacturers figured out that gently carrying ‘heavy-weight’ bottles back to the factory and washing them is somehow more expensive (to them) than having others smash light-weight bottles up, melt them down and re-sell the bottles back to them at the price of a virgin bottle.

Thirdly, marketing geniuses figured out that people buy more stuff if it changes shape occasionally and looks different to the competitors’ offering leading to the end of any hope of standardisation of bottle shapes across beverage producers that ‘your’ scheme would probably require to be economic.

Basically the level of regulation required would probably equal that of what we do to discourage cigarette use but without the obvious public benefits. A country like Japan is capable of doing this but not our laconic brown land. This is not a hill even those that breathlessly argued for the CDS scheme in the first place seem to be prepared to die on.

To distract you from lament regarding the parlous state of national decision-making consider this point. All the above applies only to beer bottles; the invention of PET and the growth of the aluminium industry have meant that for the remainder of the beverage industry, single-use containers are a no-brainer – at least in the current regulatory environment.