It's now become a weird social welfare system for the homeless, some go around collecting large bags and drop them off at recycling areas for cash in urban areas.

I think that's not a bad thing. When I was a kid in Germany we always looked for bottles to return to make some money.

I think it's a perfectly fine source of cash for people in need and willing to hustle.

It's not optimal when the poor and disadvantaged are forced to sort through the trash of others to eke out a bit of a living -- without any sort of protective gear or easy access to healthcare to treat any injuries/illnesses.

It'd be a little safer if they could just pick through recycling bins, but that's illegal [1] so they are forced to pick through trash bins.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Recycling-bins-are-ta...

Good point on the health externalities.

The recycling locations also significantly underpay CRV in my experience: if you show up with more than a small amount (I think the threshold is about 40 items) they'll only "pay by weight" at a rate that seems to be maybe half of the per item CRV (based on a single time I bothered to count it out in advance).

Going more frequently with smaller amounts would pay more but waste more time... and I estimated that it didn't make sense to do so unless you valued the cost of the trip at less than about $1.

almost every rung of the recycling ladder is beset by small cheating like this.. second note is, many, many honest recyclers simply die economically after some amount of hardship, depending on the setup

It's also too cheap. The deposit needs to be significant to make sure people bring things back.

Only enough to make very poor people collect it. In most of the bigger German cities it is considered rude to put a deposit-system beverage container inside a public trash can, you are supposed to put them on top of below, or even in a special tray so that collectors don't need to use their little LED flashlights to search the inside. Some progressive beverage companies have even made it part of their brand identity to print instructions for easily accessible abandoning on their labels.

Here in Germany, almost every store takes almost every bottle.

In oregon every store has to accept returns of at least what they sell, even convience stores.

Is there a law or is it voluntary? I don't remember.

When you sell something with a deposit on it you have to accept returns of stuff with deposit on it.

Nit pick, things work differently for multi-way and one-way containers:

- There are no special regulations for multi-way bottles (glass and plastic alike). Most stores will accept only those they are incentivized to, i.e. the brands they sell (manufacturers are eager to get them back to be able to reuse them).

- As soon as a store sells a kind of one-way container (plastic bottles, aluminum cans), they have to accept, pay out the mandatory €0.25 deposit for, and properly dispose of each and every one-way container of that kind customers bring in (in household quantities). There is a clearing mechanism, since store's sales might not match their returns.

I was looking for an intro on economics of reuse the the other day but I haven't found anything useful.

So, for example, if law allowed only for a small number of different container types (to turn them into a commodity) and then taxed production of those containers heavily, what exactly would happen?

Naively, one would expect companies to cut costs by buying second-hand containers rather than buying expensive new ones.

That would create a market for used containers. For an ordinary person it would be very much like deposit: Buy stuff with the price of container included, then sell the container to get back the money.

It would, obviously, provide a new way to cheat: Produce new containers and sell them as used ones, thus avoiding the tax. But that's just a tax avoidance trick and could be dealt with using the existing anti-tax-avoidance mechanisms.

It would be interesting to know what would be the unintended consequences of such a law.

Re: one-way bottles, it was not always that easy. When the one-way deposit was introduced in ~2004, shops were only required to take their own SKUs back. This was absolutely horrible for consumers and producers alike, so retailers introduced the shared system voluntarily.

Good point. Fortunately, that seems to have been mandated by law since 2006 (at least for stores larger than 200m² ≅ 2150 sq ft).

A remember some stores stopped accepting recyclables after it became a pattern for homeless to scavenge for the good stuff and leave a mess behind.

Most supermarkets have bottle recycling ATMs (outside the entrance) around here in Germany. The homeless scavenging bottles from public bins and returning them are doing just fine. I'm not aware of the lot of mess this causes though, not sure what you are talking about there.

Sorry I was not clear. I meant in the US.

Same in Finland.

If the deposit was more than a tiny token amount, they could make money taking them