With Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme set to go live in August, the easiest way to meet your obligations, minimise in-store effort and provide a great experience for your customers is with a reverse vending machine, says Envipco.
In Scotland we consume over two billion single-use drink containers every year. Many of these end up being left on the streets as litter and quite often end up in landfill sites or are incinerated. The issue here is twofold, firstly we pollute our beautiful country with non-biodegradable materials and the second is we waste valuable resources that could be recycled and used over and over again.
The Scottish Government has implemented a Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) which goes live on 16 August 2023, to encourage consumers to return these empty drink containers for recycling. The consumer will be charged a deposit when they purchase a drink and will have that deposit refunded once they return it. Simple but effective. Other countries using a Deposit Return Scheme achieve recycling rates over 90%.
The easiest way to collect these returned drink containers is to use a reverse vending machine (RVM).
Simply, this machine accepts the container, confirms what it is (check barcode, check dimensions, check weight, etc), compacts the material to enable efficient storage and waste collection and then authorises the return of the deposit with a voucher or digital payment.
The voucher can then be scanned at the checkout to reduce the customer’s shopping bill or create a cash credit. Finally, the machine reports all the data back to the System Administrator, who then credits the retailer for all the deposits returned to consumers and pays the retailer a handling fee as compensation for the service they are offering.
For the retailer, the reverse vending machine fully automates this whole process, without it, everything must be done manually at the counter.
At Envipco, we have spent 40 years designing and manufacturing reverse vending machines and have been at the forefront of developments over the years. We have a full range of RVMs from large ‘bulk-feed’ sized machines down to our market leading Flex RVM, designed specifically for the convenience sector.
Contact us to help you prepare for the Deposit Return Scheme.
