Reverse vending machines are increasingly popular in Europe and parts of China. You can find them in grocery stores, schools, office parks and street corners. The concept works exactly as you imagine it should: you drop in your empty bottle, the machine gives you a refund.
It’s an efficient way to both encourage and facilitate the recycling process. And it’s not even new. The first American patent fir a “Bottle Return and Handling Machine” was filed in 1920. So where are they? Why don’t we see any reverse vending machines stateside?
Because, where it counts, Americans simply don’t care that much about recycling. Sure, we pretend to care; celebrities and corporate memos implore us to please recycle all the time. But we don’t care enough to make the companies generating recyclable waste to shoulder a significant amount of the burden.
In Norway, vendors are required to pay for the recycling of their own products—they’re profiting off its sale, so the state shouldn’t have to pay to clean it up—so corporate revenues help fund cutting-edge recycling programs there. It’s why Norway is home to one of the biggest reverse vending machine companies, Tomra. As a result, you get mini-beverage vending complexes that look like this:
Scotland is another reverse vending machine hotspot, thanks in part to its government’s ambitious zero waste policies. By law, waste contractors must “provide collection and treatment services which deliver high quality recycling.” As such, companies like Reverse Vending have helped turned Edinburgh has become a hot spot for reverse vending.
And the U.S.? Where we currently only manage to recycle 28% of our plastic bottles? Not so much. There are now a handful of legit reverse vending machines at college campuses. And there are now 150 or so recycling “Dream Machines” in Rite Aid stores as part of a pilot program, but there’s a big difference—they don’t actually give you a monetary refund, just points you can redeem for “prizes.” Yay.
Everyone should read Lloyd Alter’s expletive-laden short history on why recycling is bullshit —the tale involves big beverage corporations hijacking efforts to make them accountable for the full lifecycle of their products by promoting recycling schemes, which cities or states have to fund with taxpayer dollars, instead.
See, after the rise of disposable beverage (read: soda, beer) bottles, which didn’t happen until the 1940s, the nation was suddenly struck, surprise, with a huge trash problem. Many states were considering bans on disposables, which would force the beverage companies to manufacture exponentially more sustainable refillable bottles and return to the fountain model. Big Beverage said no, wait: just recycle. Sure, they poured some money into readying the facilities and promoting the efforts—but then they just shoved the burden onto cities and states to run the system forever after. And that’s how the American people got suckered into recycling bottles for multibillion dollar multinational corporations.
We’ve been doing it ever since. Reverse vending machines, which have been prominent in other nations for decades, making recycling easy. And they’re not even the optimal solution; that’d be refillable bottles. But we’re never likely to see either here in the states, because better recycling tech on a large scale would require significant upfront costs—costs the citizens would have to shoulder.
Changing the political culture around beverage waste would be even more difficult—companies like Coke and Pepsi have massive lobbying power, and any effort to get them to contribute a greater share of their profits to keep their trash off the streets would of course be met with massive opposition. Never mind that only about a quarter of plastic waste actually gets recycled, or that there’s effective tech out there that streamlines the recycling process and keeps more plastic crap out of the landfills—that’s not their problem.