German Deposit Refund System for Drinking Containers

tibfox(73)

Published in

#environment

Words

908

Reading

5 min

Listen

Play

Welcome to another episode of

"tibfox want to write some written stuff"!

220px-Dpgkennz.svg.png

Today I want to tell you something about the German deposit refund system for drinking bottles and cans because it is a big deal in this country. Everyone is drinking things and everyone needs to go to a Leergut-Automat.

This is one of the few things connecting all people in germany what makes me a bit happy.. hmm.. I don't know why.

Because I have no clue where YOU are coming from and if your country has got this kind of system:

some basics

A so called "deposit refund system"
... is maintained by an amount of money the buyer pays for every single item he is buying and receives that amount back when bringing the packaging ( in this case drinking packaging like bottles and cans) back to the place he purchased them.

There are many definitions
... of "drinking bottles" and "drinking cans" here in Germany but these are the main ones:

beer bottles: 0,08€
other glass bottles: 0,15€
one way plastic bottles: 0,25€ (harder plastics)
reusable plastic bottles: 0,15€ (soft cancer causing plastics)
cans: 0,25€
empty drinking bottle crates: 1,50€ (most of them)

Side note
There are also bottles and cans outside of this circle (what is a bit of a grey zone) but there are regulations about that in Germany (of course lol) and I don't want to write in detail about that here ;)

But how can I be sure this is one?
On every bottle and can you can find some illustrations or notes on the packaging, telling you if the bottle/can is part of that system or not.

the Practice

My car is a collecting space
... for many stuff and trash but for bottles and cans as well. Because I mostly drink these things in my car while driving to or from work. So behind the backseat is a little messy space I throw empty cans and bottles and I am treasuring them up until I feel like driving in a junk yard.

(Fortunately I forgot to take a picture before cleaning this)

This morning I woke up
.. in my holidays and I felt like: Let's give them back into their lifecycle!

So I drove to my favourite supermarket (hoping I am the only one with this idea) and packed my little treasure in a shopping cart.

It was pretty exciting because I didn't knew how long I need to wait because their are just 2 machines and the queue is often pretty long.

But today I was lucky and had just 2 persons in front of me in the queue to the holy "Leergut-Automat"

Leer = empty
gut = product
Automat = machine

So the bottles and cans in my cart called just "Leergut" in German.

So I surfed a bit on steemit (of course.. because I am addicted to steem) and did my work after waiting some minutes. Because of the lucky happening, that I had such a mass/mess of cans (0,25€), I made a lot of money with that. Katchiiiing

After the whole process you receive a little receipt which is accepted as an official payment method in the supermarket you are in right now. The little sheet of paper lasts some months if you forget to hand it out at the cashiers place. And believe me: this happens almost everytime for me...

Some side facts

The whole system is targeting to save nature from cans/bottles.
But: Of course not everyone is taking care of the nature or just throw these cans and bottles in public trash bins. This is the reason for a common image of poor people and people with too much time, collecting this stuff. You see them everywhere in every time, walking through the city with a big bag full of empty containers.

I always place my bottles next to trash bins and not into them to make it a bit easier for the collecters. There is also a movement called "Flaschen gehören daneben" (bottles shall placed next and not into trash bins) which is pretty successful in Germany (at least in the big cities).

(picture from the official homepage)