It's similar, but not quite the same. The above creates an incentive for people to collect bottles, but not an incentive for retailers to encourage bottle returns, which results in experiences for consumers that often makes it seem like it's not worth it. E.g. if you're forced to bring your bottles to a recycling centre instead of to the grocery store you're headed anyway, it's a lot less likely to happen.

Getting the incentives right across the whole chain is important.

E.g. I can't rememember ever seeing an automated bottle return machine like these [1] [2] in a US grocery store. It's been a few years, so it may have gotten more widespread, and I know some states have had return laws that have been more effective, so I'm sure it depends on location. In Norway the norm is for most grocery stores and shopping centres with any stores that sell bottles to have those.

Part of the reason is that in Norway, if people don't return bottles, the cost for retailers and distributors go up (or more precisely, their tax does not go down) by more than the cost of the recycling, so it's not just consumers that are incentivised, but retailers and distributors too, with the result that there's a massive infrastructure targeted at making it easy to return (and as a result one of the largest manufacturers wordwide of automated return solutions is Norwegian as well).

I currently live in the UK, which is much worse than the US when it comes to bottle rturns, and really wish the above solution would become more widespread.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_vending_machine

[2] http://www.wikiwand.com/no/Flaskepant#/Panteautomater