Let's talk about 'going green'

I agree. A big part of the issue here is lobbying and the packaging industry body; Repack. Eco Eye had a special on littering and recycling in Ireland a couple of months back. Apparently in Germany, the packaging industry has to contribute €1000 per ton of packaging they produce to go towards the cost of recycling it or disposing of in a non polluting way once it is discarded. In Ireland we ask the packaging industry to contribute only €80 per ton. Several countries have glass bottle deposit schemes where the customer gets money back for returning intact glass bottles for reuse which virtually eliminates glass waste, but we don’t. We had a glass bottle plant but apparently some genius decided that that plant would better serve the country first as a vapourware Celtic tiger apartment block pipe dream and more recently as a vast area of scrub land.

/r/ireland Thread