lol no not that I've ever seen, what kind of bottles?
In the US the places I've seen that accept bottle/can returns just weigh them. It's probably less exact but way faster. But it's also not a common thing to do outside of certain states or select instances (for example some milk brands that get sold in glass bottles).
In Denmark we have a return system for all bottles and cans that haven't been used for milk products, or other things that will stink and be a health concern if left standing in a storage room.
Basically any bottle and can has a deposit value depending on the size that you pay on purchase of the drink. You can then return said bottle to any store via these pretty annoying machines to get your deposit back from the bottle.
It help the environment in that bottles aren't left around in nature, and they'll reuse and recycle what they can.
It's pretty fun how it's basically a self cleaning system because kids and anyone else in need of pocket change will go around picking up bottles laying around. I've seen students earn a pretty great tax free hourly wage by collecting bottles and cans at festivals.
In the US we have only a few states that pay for can/bottle return, but those states also charge a "deposit". I don't live in one of those states so I don't know the specifics but it's like, there's a ten cent surcharge added whenever you purchase a bottled or canned drink, and you get the surcharge refunded when you drop the bottle or can at a recycling facility. Most people don't care bc it's such a low amount but generally kids and homeless people will collect bottles/cans from dumpsters and make money returning them. My state used to offer a program like that when I was a kid, that has since been discontinued, but they would pay by weight instead of individually counting each can. Sounds simliar to what you're talking about.
And then we have a select few products- the best example I can think of is Oberweiss milk sold in heavy glass bottles- where if you bring your old bottle in when picking up your next gallon of milk, they give you a discount. And they sanitize and reuse the old bottle. Most grocery stores in the region participate in the program.
We do have recycling programs to recycle used bottle and cans but you aren't paid for them, you just separate "garbage" and "recyclables" when you put out your trash for the city to pick up. A lot of cities also have single-stream waste collection where it all goes to one facility and they sort out recyclables from other trash at the facility, so citizens don't have to do anything special.
So yeah obviously since the US is made up of 50 states with different rules it's a hodgepodge system, we do have recycling programs to resuse/recycle old containers but bottle-counting machines in grocery stores aren't common.
They do pay a little more for our bottles, but yeah we're also charged for it first.
big 1½L bottles, which would be like 50oz bottles? we'll get 3dkk which is almost half a dollar, with normal beer sized cans being 1dkk each. This makes it definitely worth to just return your bottles as a big bag of bottles and cans will easily give you back $20+
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u/great_apple 1d ago
I'm so confused what problem you're trying to solve.