Special Assistant to Prime Minister SAPM Malik Amin Aslam inaugurated the first-ever reverse vending machine for plastic bottles in Pakistan.
Talking to media, the minister said that technology can truly boost the agenda of dealing with plastic waste as a part of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Clean Green Pakistan programme.
A reverse vending machine is a device that accepts used (empty) beverage containers and returns money to the user. The machines are popular in places that have mandatory recycling laws or container deposit legislation.
In some places, bottlers paid funds into a centralized pool to be disbursed to people who recycled the containers. Any excess funds were to be used for general environmental cleanup.
In other places, such as Norway, the state mandated that a vendor pay for recycled bottles but left the system in the hands of private industry.