A long overdue scheme. It's been around parts of Europe for twenty plus years. The best part is that if you're a lazy cunt and discard your bottle then it means someone else can profit. Hopefully it'll also keep the streets a little cleaner?
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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Agreed.
I'm sure it used to be a thing in the past too, I remember my grandparents talking about taking bottles back to the shop. Before that my great grandmother used to get milk and orange juice from the milk float, then left the empties out for them to be washed and refilled.
Beer used to be distributed in earthen jugs, which remained brewery property and had to be returned. Same for milk bottles. The idea of buying the packaging as well as the product is fairly new.
An earthen jug of ale is definitely something I can get behind
That was a better scheme. That was only for glass bottles, as they were collected from the stores and reused.
In theory it is a great idea. Ideally, the obligation would be put on the companies, but they would pass the charge on anyway.
They are an amazing money earner for the government, but it completely undermines MUP where applicable. Bin scavenging is a problem - all over (not just Dublin).
Hopefully it will be done properly. In Ireland you already pay for the recycling, then you have to pay to get your money back for the cans and bottles, and the machines are terrible compared to the Norwegian ones for example. In the Irish machines you have to carry a sack of cans and queue for the machines to get your money back (queues can be 10 minutes), the machines are constantly full and you have to wait for a member of staff from the shop to come out and empty it so that it can be used again (which can take much longer depending on the store). Once you get to the machine itself you have to carefully put the cans and bottles in one by one. Often the machine doesn't read them properly and spits them back out, or just won't accept them anyway. They also won't accept bottles or cans from other stores own brands even though they are being crushed, and there are no wipes or water taps of any description to clean up after sticking your arm down a bag of dribbled leftovers of about 30-40 cans for 5 minutes, and your arm is stinking of beer or sweet drinks and hand is sticky.
TL;DR
PRAY that the Scandinavian (and other countries) model is the one that arrives, and not the gammy one by one model that causes queues, jams and gets full all the time.
So if I understand this scheme right, a standard 6 pack of cans are going to cost £1.20 more and I am going to have to collect them and store them separately to the other 4 separated rubbish categories I already have.
Then lug them all to a collection point to get the deposit back instead of placing them in my recycling that I already pay the council to collect every (other) week anyway.
Great, just great, how convenient.
Let me tell you exactly how this will play out. No one will return the bottles and your public rubbish bins will be opened and their contents spilled on the ground, as the indigent dig through it looking for the bottles. No they will not clean up after themselves. Yes, rubbish will get every where. And then your bins start to have preachy stickers about turning things in to avoid the crackcoons from digging through the rubbish.
Source: exactly what happens in metropolitan areas in NL