>In the Transylvanian village of Pianu de Jos, 51-year-old Dana Chitucescu gathers a sack of empty polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, aluminium cans and glass every week and takes it to her local shop.
>Like millions of Romanians across cities and rural areas, Chitucescu has woven the country’s two-year-old deposit return system (DRS) into her routine.
>It is a simple scheme: when buying soft drinks or alcoholic beverages, the customer pays an extra 0.50 Romanian leu (£0.09) per bottle and gets the money back when returning the packaging, cleaned and in its original shape, to a collection point ( usually the same shops where the goods were bought).
>Chitucescu makes about 40 leu a week from recycling her and another family’s bottles. “That covers the food for my seven cats,” she said. “It’s a great system, everyone in our village uses it, there’s always a queue at the shop.”
optichange on
>Her weekly walk is one tiny part of a national shift that, until recently, seemed impossible. Romania’s recycling rates were among the lowest in the EU, but in the two years since the scheme launched, beverage-packaging collection and recycling has skyrocketed to as high as 94% in some months.
Greedy_Reflection_75 on
I think they’re using some weaseling to get to largest, but yeah despoit schemes work.
3 Comments
>In the Transylvanian village of Pianu de Jos, 51-year-old Dana Chitucescu gathers a sack of empty polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, aluminium cans and glass every week and takes it to her local shop.
>Like millions of Romanians across cities and rural areas, Chitucescu has woven the country’s two-year-old deposit return system (DRS) into her routine.
>It is a simple scheme: when buying soft drinks or alcoholic beverages, the customer pays an extra 0.50 Romanian leu (£0.09) per bottle and gets the money back when returning the packaging, cleaned and in its original shape, to a collection point ( usually the same shops where the goods were bought).
>Chitucescu makes about 40 leu a week from recycling her and another family’s bottles. “That covers the food for my seven cats,” she said. “It’s a great system, everyone in our village uses it, there’s always a queue at the shop.”
>Her weekly walk is one tiny part of a national shift that, until recently, seemed impossible. Romania’s recycling rates were among the lowest in the EU, but in the two years since the scheme launched, beverage-packaging collection and recycling has skyrocketed to as high as 94% in some months.
I think they’re using some weaseling to get to largest, but yeah despoit schemes work.