Bring back your empties: New deposit return scheme is coming to drive up your drinks bill

The only way to achieve high recycling rates is a deposit return scheme

A man puts a bottle into a deposit machine in a supermarket. Photo: Getty

Gabrielle Monaghan

Chances are you spent some of your Christmas holidays washing out drinks cans and bottles, stuffing them into an already-overloaded recycling bin, dragging the bin to a kerbside, and paying for a waste collection.

But as a nation, we’re just rubbish at managing our recycling: just 60pc of the 1.9bn plastic bottles and drinks cans we use each year is collected from our recycling bins. The remainder goes to landfill, is incinerated, or is discarded by litter louts on our beaches, streets, parks, fields and ditches.