10
WTF Poland: You Still Struggling
(suppo.fi)
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If you do sort this out, poland, don't do it in the strage german way where you have to visit like three different stores to hand in your bottles and cans.
In Sweden, 1kr (about €0.08) is added to the cost of the can at the till. You take your empty cans to a supermarket with a pantmaskin (Pfandmaschine) and feed them in, receiving a voucher redeemable against purchases. The machine works by scanning the bar code on the can and checking it against a database of products whose packaging incurs the pant deposit.
IIRC, the machines come from a Dutch(?) company named Tomra and are also in use elsewhere (Norway has a similar scheme).
This is essential identical to the German way, except here we have a deposit 0,25 € per single use bottle. However, in Germany, shops that don't sell e.g. metal cans or single use glass bottles (e.g. beer with twist off lock) or don't sell single use containers at all, don't have to take these back.
With multi use glass bottles it is mostly uncomplicated. You only may experience issues when you have bought e.g. beer in a fancy bottle type (e.g. foreign beer or beer from a small brewery) that you rarely find in other shops.
When you go to large shops e.g. Kaufland you get the same experience like in Sweden at ICA, Coop, City Gross or Willy's where you simply put everything, single use and multi use, into a single automat and get a voucher afterwards. At our local (smaller) EDEKAs and REWEs you sometimes don't have that much luck.
Pantamera!
I just visit TrinkGut for Pfand. They haven't denied me anything ever, probably because there's also people working at the store scanning your Pfand bottles
Disposable bottles can be returned to almost any shop, but refillable bottles must be returned to a shop that also sells this type of bottle. I do not think there is a much better solution. Forcing shops to take back everything would be quite chaotic and very expensive.
In my experience very few shops take cans sold at like pizza places and kebab shops, and it also seem to have to be the same shop, the same chain is not enough. In Sweden every shop with a pfandmachine takes all (exceptions for foreign bottles, some they take but do not give pfand for).
That's not true. It doesn't have to be the same shop, the shop just needs to sell the item. Someone else mentioned Edeka and Rewe, which both have varying inventories. Therefore the specific shop might not sell the item you bought in a different shop of the same chain, therefore it's not returnable there. Many large shops (don't remember how large they need to be) are required to take everything though.
Fair enough on that point. Does not really help though. It is not very convenient still if you have to browse the shop before you can return the bottle.
Just be glad your system is more or less universal and doesn't depend on what type of liquid the bottle contained and whether that product is offered at the particular store you return your bottles at...
This isn't a real problem in daily life. You know where your bought Mehrweg-Bottles are accepted. It may become a consideration when buying certain products.
Einweg is accepted everywhere.
My point is: We should accept Pfand from neighbours and the other way around.