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orbat · 1777 days ago · link · · parent · post: SE Asian countries have decided that the wealthy don't get to dump whatever they like into their environment
Wait, how did they manage to screw up bottle deposits? Us Europeans have been doing those for ages and they seem to work fine. Here in Finland all glass and plastic beverage bottles have deposits, so the recycling rate is really high (and we actually recycle them, not just offload them to some poorer country)
From a larceny standpoint they didn't screw anything up - they take your money and keep it. As a tax it's fine. As an incentive to recycle, closing down the places you can get your deposit back limits the incentive to hold onto your bottles. It doesn't help that Waste Management, the company that gets the recycling contract, is mafia-owned.