Recycling Cans & Plastic Bottles: Extra Cash or A Destructive Enterprise

No, that’s not several trash bins overflowing. That’s Sweden, where recycling is King.

Swedes love to recycle!

Love It! 

In fact, 99% of items Swedes use are recycled. 

It’s not unusual to go to someones house and find a minuscule trash can, because everything else gets recycled.

The coffee machine is about as big as a typical household trash can in Sweden.

Or go to work and find 1 trash can for 30 people (and it still isn’t full after the full day). 

On the left is food rubbish to be decomposed, while on the right is the only cafeteria trash can for 30 people.

 

And yet, whenever you go to the store and buy a liter bottle of coke or a can of beer, you’re charged an extra Krona (about 14 cents).

Many people see this as a strategy to encourage you to recycle. However, there are problems to paying people for their recycling:

1) Purity is key

Damaged cans are no good for recycling:

How can a can be recycled if you can’t read the bar code? There couldn’t be another way….not in beautiful Sweden!

Damaged cans are worth nothing (there’s goes that 1 kr). Hopefully you kept all of the other 50 cans from your party in good condition.

2) Take your receipt

Forgetting to take your receipt or forgetting where you left the paper earns you no money back!

How could a machine pay you direct cash? This is Sweden; we’re cashless and care about the environment: please take your receipt.

Cash dispensed would then allow people to buy anything, including alcohol…and that would be bad.

So, recycling = money for grocery stores (who sell beer….but it’s weak beer….and no one would collect enough cans to buy enough weak beer to continue with their alcoholism.

You can cash them in or donate your kronor to the Red Cross….How did they get so lucky to be the only organization I can donate to?

3) After this process, you may now claim your prize

If you remember to hand the receipt to the cashier. Oh well, next               time I’ll remember to give it to them. 

Do not lose this or your life is over.

With this hassle, cans and plastic bottles are some of the least recycled products in Sweden, at least by those who drank the contents.

See, Swedes would rather not go through this hassle, and instead typically toss them in the nearest public bin for others to rummage through and eventually make a killing on their bags of cans.

I’m not throwing away items that could be recycled, I’m creating jobs, thinks a Swede.

In fact, digging through the trash grew so large that Uppsala has now replaced normal trash cans with these industry beasts throughout the center of the city!

Nice Swedes place their cans in these “can containers” (on the left) so that “pickers” can more easily reach and recycle them without leaving trash all over the ground. The city installed these bear proof solar trash compactors….politically for multiple reasons, but in truth, so pickers aren’t able to continue littering the street while digging for cans.

In private areas, like housing/apartment complexes, there are locked rooms around the neighborhoods where people divide their recyclables, so that pickers can’t weed through the trash looking for them while creating a mess.

About once a month I’m stopped entering my apartment by unfamiliar people asking me to open the recycling room for them.

If cans and plastic bottles didn’t have this monetary recycle value, then people wouldn’t go rummaging through the trash, and then the recycle/trash rooms wouldn’t need to be locked.

But apparently it’s either cheaper or easier to just install solar powered trash compactors that are bear proof throughout the city. No one is getting into my rubbish bin, claims the city! (Disclaimer: Not literally said by the city)

One of several found along the Fyris river; downtown Uppsala.

On one hand, Swedes recycle a lot, so why wouldn’t they recycle cans/plastic bottles? On the other, people living on the street can earn money in a legal way by finding and recycling the cans. And are often seen at major events approaching people asking for their cans.

Morning after Valborg 2012 in Uppsala. No cans, but plenty of broken glass bottles. Maybe there should be a cash reward for recycling glass!

Do you think that the aluminum cans and plastic bottles should have this 1kr surcharge or does it create more issues (i.e. recycling them is just easier)?

Sweden LOVES Recycling

Coming from the US, where you have to pay to recycle products in many areas, Sweden is a dream for people conscientious about the environment and a nightmare for people trying to learn how to dispose of their trash.

 

When I first came to Sweden, I was shown around the office (and my new apartment building), including an entire room that is devoted to the recycling. There is recycling for nearly everything that you’d use on a daily basis! From paper-ware to cardboard to cans to tin foil to light bulbs and batteries. Even the environmentally horrifying 

styrofoam has a place to be recycled. In fact, at the end of the tour, I asked “ok, but where do I throw away my trash?”

It was absolutely the smallest bin in the whole room! And one of the two “trash” cans was only used for leftover food.

Sweden’s recycling has been so successful it has had to import trash from other countries in order to power their waste-to-energy program. Read more information on that here.

On sweden.se (specifically, here) there are dozens of various green initiatives that Sweden is involved with–such as leading the EU in eating organic foods, recycling 88% of all cans, and how it gets its title as the country with the highest share of energy from renewable resources.