They do this exact thing in Michigan. Ten cent can and bottle return to local grocery stores and you cash out at the register.

It costs the state MILLIONS of dollars every year.

This post was edited by Cambridge on Aug 11 2018 12:21pm

In Michigan, do they charge extra for the bottles when initially purchased?

They're not counting total energy usage. That's 36% of electricity. How many electric cars and trucks are there in Germany? Do people use electricity to heat their homes in the winter?
Take for example gas:
https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/en/corporate/pdf/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2018-full-report.pdf

23.7% of all germany energy usage comes from gas, but only 13.5% of their electricity. 50% of their imported gas comes from Russia, but only 34% of all their gas.
Look at the bp chart on page 36 tables 1 & 2
48.5/94.8 billion cubic meters from Russia (51.2%) by pipeline. N/A via LNG from the US.

Electricity =/= energy. Russia still needs gas to keep their homes warm, oil to run their vehicles, coal to power industry. And like I said, 50/40/30% of those imports respectively come from Russia.

Yes. You pay a can/bottle deposit whenever you buy them and then essentially get that money back by returning them after use.

how exactly does this create costs for the state?

the german "pfand"-system for bottles is one of the very few decent ideas the Green Party has ever had.

Because it’s difficult to place limitations on where refund marked cans get distributed and sold.
So states that are close, like Ohio, get these refund marked cans but do NOT charge a deposit because they don’t offer a refund.
People will travel from out of state with truck loads of refund marked cans, not having paid any deposit, and getting a return anyhow.

Michigan has tried to crack down on this but it still costs them $10-13M annually.

This post was edited by Cambridge on Aug 11 2018 12:33pm

OP isn't even German

Even looking at this, you were citing things like nuclear.
I don’t think nuclear powers a car.
Thus would imply domestic electricity.
Vehicles are not relevant right now, as it’s a much bigger challenge to get those to renewable.

I inferred what your point was by bringing in words such as nuclear, leading me to believe we were speaking about running the country itself, not its transportation.

If you throw in transportation usage, yeah, it’s makes everything look smaller.

This post was edited by IchBinDaddy on Aug 11 2018 12:37pm

agreed on the idiocy of forcefully abandoning nuclear power that quickly. big mistake imo, the only upside (apart from avoiding fukushima or chernobyl like disasters, and radioactive waste) is that it somewhat accelerates the development and funding of renewable energy sources, but that effect is rather small and overall certainly not worth it.

but then comes the fearmongering ofc: '50 % of their imported gas is from russia and they still have no LNG terminals' ofc sounds much more sinister than the whole truth:

36% of our totally consumed gas is imported from russia, and that percentage keeps declining as we're actively diversifying our sources, specifically to be more independent from russia (government policy). we have secure LNG supply through the close terminals in rotterdam (netherlands), zeebrugge (belgium), and dunkerque (france) that are currently at just 6%, 12%, and 7% of their maximum capacity - AND we're still building our own terminal in brunsbüttel.

but hey, it's not a goo-shill post without a bit of trumpaganda, right?

oh lol, that's fucked up. the system would work if the entire country was using it. I'm honestly surprised that California et al have banned straws, but havent adopted this system yet.

btw, here in Germany, we solve this issue (people trying to return bottles they have bought without deposit in neighboring austria, france, netherlands) by the barcode. our bottle-return-machines are reading the code on each bottle, and only bottles that were bought in germany with a deposit are accepted. when you're done, the machine gives you a voucher that you cash out. so the return-machines automatically ensure that only bottles from within the german system can be cashed out.

but to be fair, it might be harder to justify all this effort for a 10m state than for an 80m country like germany.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 11 2018 12:41pm