Speaking as someone who cares about the environment, I think that environmentalism in Germany has parallels to religious practice. I don't think that it's a coincidence that Germany is extremely areligious, and that sorting trash is taken to such an extreme.
Sorting trash is a ritual, it is slightly sacrificial in time (especially returning bottles to the store), and it can be seen as a penance for the sin of purchasing single use products.
I think we will continue to see more things like this pop up as people search for meaning in their lives, and want things that they can do daily to affirm that meaning.
For glass bottles, yes. That's been done for a long time, and they're 8 cents a bottle. What's perhaps poorly remembered is that when plastic started to come into use in the 90s, the government decided that reusable plastic bottles should have a pfand of 15 cents, and single use plastic bottles should have a pfand of 25 cents.
This means that bottles that specifically cannot be reused must be held onto and carried back to the store, so that they can be crushed and recycled. The machine you must feed your bottles into to get your 25 cents back crushes them itself. Someone who tosses those bottles into the recycling bin has done nothing better for the environment than someone who returns them to the store.
This seems absurd, but it's the whole point of the 25 cent pfand for single use bottles. People who buy those are supposed to pay the penance of taking them to the store and getting their money back for the sin of buying non reusable bottles.
Maybe you don't understand the system but as you have described it is working as intended. Recycling is a meme. The point of a deposit system is that you return your bottles so that they can be disposed of properly. Maybe it is too difficult for you to understand but lots of people would litter without the deposit. There is no cultist conspiracy theory behind the deposit program.
The original intent of the glass bottle deposit system was not from the government at all. It was for the manufacturers to wash and reuse glass bottles.
If the issue is litter, why are glass bottles 8 cents, reusable plastic bottles 15 cents, and single use plastic 25 cents? There is no difference from an environmental standpoint whether you take your single use bottle back to the store or throw it in your recycling bin.
When the 25 cent pfand for single use was instituted, it was very clear that this was because the government wanted consumers to have to undergo the same hassle of returning plastic bottles as they did for glass bottles, otherwise, they would prefer to buy things in plastic bottles where they didn't have to haul the bottles back to the store.
The hassle is your penance for buying the single use product. Alternatively, you can throw them in the recycling bin and pay the 25 cents, but then you run into the other German religion of thriftiness. Throwing away 25 cents creates guilt, so even relatively well off Germans haul their plastic bottles back to the store.
I suppose the truly religious environmentalists can buy indulgences in the form of carbon credits. Airlines offer them so the people guilty about travel can pay the owner of a forest to do nothing. Not perfect because you still make carbon, but at least you don’t have to pilgrimage in a sailboat like Greta Thunberg.
If carbon credits are implemented without massive fraud, I don't think it's fair to call them indulgences. If enough people bought carbon credits under a working system it would be a flood of money toward restricting carbon release and recapturing carbon.
Carbon credits most probably are a massive fraud. First it is unclear what measures each credit you buy will take to capture/reduce/limit carbon. Then, those credits are too cheap to have any plausible benefit. Even staunch fans usually introduce them with "well, its something, its a start".
I think carbon credits are a scam in the same stage recycling was 20 or 30 years ago.
Carbon credits are issued to companies in the industry based on a certain amount they are allowed to pollute. This is the cap, the credits are the trade, in "cap-and-trade". However, all that pollution still gets polluted in the end, the only thing that changes is who does it, and who pays. Other players can enter the market and claim to absorb carbon, but very often these people are just monetizing ecosystem services that were already happening before they showed up.
If the cost of the credit was of the same value as removing the pollution, sure. This doesn't happen, though. Like sin, the credit doesn't undo the pollution, it just forgives it. The world still gets more polluted either way.
> Carbon credits are issued to companies in the industry based on a certain amount they are allowed to pollute. This is the cap, the credits are the trade, in "cap-and-trade". However, all that pollution still gets polluted in the end, the only thing that changes is who does it, and who pays.
The baseline is that all the credits are being bought by industrial polluters. If you personally buy a credit, industry has to pollute less. If you buy 1.5 credits for every credit-worth of extra pollution you cause, the pollution in the world is reduced. In theory.
> The world still gets more polluted either way.
The more credits people buy and sit on, the less pollution there can be. At first this is all low hanging fruit, but eventually the price gets so high that it's cheaper for industries to pay for carbon capture than to pay for credits. If enough are bought, and the price of credits goes high enough, total regulated pollution drops to zero or even goes under zero.
That's not an indulgence if you can minimize the loopholes.
Sorting trash is a ritual, it is slightly sacrificial in time (especially returning bottles to the store), and it can be seen as a penance for the sin of purchasing single use products.
I think we will continue to see more things like this pop up as people search for meaning in their lives, and want things that they can do daily to affirm that meaning.