Dr. Dominic Hogg:

I was interested in the comment about innovation because one of the more interesting points was the level of engagement retailers get with their consumers in connection with modern deposit schemes and the reverse vending machine. They can engage instantaneously via touchscreens and online and the data retailers can extract from a modern deposit refund scheme are at least as valuable to them as the scheme itself. We are engaged in a study on what we would do if we were to design a recycling system anew today. The technology has moved on in terms of quality, particularly in the case of the extraction of plastics from mixed waste sorting. In the Norwegian example, they decided that having a deposit scheme for high-value containers meant they would not have to bother with the rest, which they would extract at the back end before the material went into an incinerator. This also recognises that if plastic is left to go into the incinerator we would just be burning fossil carbon and sending it up into the sky.