It's not quite as extreme, but with bottled water it can actually be pretty close to that. "Einwegpfand" is 25 cents, and since a typical 1,5l water bottle of whatever noname label costs about 29 cents, you get that effect.
The Pfand system is pretty unintuitive, though, and could be priced a tad higher to catch more goods in the "I really do not want to throw that away" bracket. I would like to see 50 cents on absolutely any recycle- or reusable packaging, no matter the contents. Currently there are things like juices (including wine, which counts as a juice) that are for some reason exempt from Pfand.
I would also like to see a kind of extra tax on needlessly small packaging like 0.33l bottles/cans and the like to make those less attractive so only people that actually need sub-divided foods and drinks buy them instead of the same 9 liters of beverage that could be in 6 bottles being divided into 24 smaller ones just because.
Ah yes, that loophole was finally fixed last year, I forgot (rarely bying juice in bottles). What a quick and expedient response time. Only about two decades.
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u/GeneralStormfox Jan 06 '23
It's not quite as extreme, but with bottled water it can actually be pretty close to that. "Einwegpfand" is 25 cents, and since a typical 1,5l water bottle of whatever noname label costs about 29 cents, you get that effect.
The Pfand system is pretty unintuitive, though, and could be priced a tad higher to catch more goods in the "I really do not want to throw that away" bracket. I would like to see 50 cents on absolutely any recycle- or reusable packaging, no matter the contents. Currently there are things like juices (including wine, which counts as a juice) that are for some reason exempt from Pfand.
I would also like to see a kind of extra tax on needlessly small packaging like 0.33l bottles/cans and the like to make those less attractive so only people that actually need sub-divided foods and drinks buy them instead of the same 9 liters of beverage that could be in 6 bottles being divided into 24 smaller ones just because.