WHAT if you could win prizes and make charity donations without dipping into your purse just for recycling your plastic bottles and drinks cans? National waste management company Ecoembes wants to find out, and is hoping it will lead to cleaner streets and a healthier planet.
It has set up 'yellow slot machines', as a complement to the existing 'yellow bin' for plastics and aluminium, in 10 railway stations and 21 towns and villages nationwide, and any member of the public can use them, resident or not.
At the moment, the 10 in stations are on the Barcelona metro only, as a pilot scheme – and these transport hubs have been chosen because they tend to be in daily use by a high number of members of the public and are the places where people are most likely to consume bottled water or fizzy drinks in cans.
But they are expected to be rolled out gradually around the country.
Users scan the QR code on the slot machine, then scan the barcode on the bottle or can they are discarding, and earn points per recycle.
These points, known as RECICLOS – in capital letters – turn into donations for food banks and entries into prize draws, where users can win train tickets, electric skateboards, and potentially more gifts as time goes on and they are added to the range.
Nowadays, an estimated 37 million people in Spain – over three-quarters of the nation, which has a population of 47 million – say they sort their household and business waste and recycle everything they can, and in fact, from under 5% of plastics, paper, glass and aluminium being recycled 20 years ago, nearly 79% of these now go on to a new life.
Ecoembes wants these 37 million to carry on recycling and do so more, and to capture the other 10 million from the cradle upwards.
Its spokesman Xavier Balagué says: “With the arrival of these machines, we're taking another step towards revolutionising the current recycling system, contributing to creating a new circular economy able to respond to new challenges and aims set down in law by Europe, and rewarding the efforts of those members of the public who opt to recycle via social and environmental benefits that will have a positive impact on their immediate surroundings.”
Still a long way from Norway's plastic bottle machines which pay per item recycled, or the long-defunct scheme from 1970s' Britain where consumers could return their glass drinks bottles to the shop and get a few pennies for each, the Ecoembes machines actually limit the number of RECICLOS or points a person can earn – but for good reason.
Allowing endless points, or paying people for their waste, might encourage them to consume more drinks in cans or plastic bottles, which does not tie in with the overall European aim of reducing the use of these non-biodegradable materials.
In theory, use of plastic or aluminium would not need to be reduced if every single person recycled theirs, as they would simply be turned back into new bottles and cans – but as it is unlikely 100% of the population will ever do so 100% of the time, it means raw materials for new plastics and cans would have to be mined, plundering the earth's natural resources, to keep up with demand.
Ecoembes says the typical profile of a person who rarely or never recycles is male and aged 27, and that of a person who always recycles is female and aged 39, so they spoke to both these 'stereotypes' after locating those whose action or inaction fit the description.
The young non-recycling men said, in general, that they are starting to realise the importance of recycling as a way of protecting the planet and of potentially reducing the cost of consumer goods where the material needed to manufacture them comes from household rubbish bins, but that they generally feel a bit lazy about it, especially when it is inconvenient because the recycling banks are too far away.
These people interviewed said the slot-machine idea would be 'an effective way' of getting more people, themselves included, to do what 'wouldn't cost them anything' but which they knew would be helping others in an immediate and direct way, such as funding food parcels for the poor.
The 'typical' 39-year-old female obsessive recyclers interviewed by Ecoembes said the slot machines were a 'fantastic idea' to encourage people who are 'not used to recycling'.
Other than on the Barcelona metro, the yellow slot machines have been set up in 21 towns, villages and cities, in the regions of Catalunya, the Balearic Islands, Murcia, Aragón and Madrid, but Ecoembes is planning to roll them out to every region in Spain throughout 2021.
Plastic bottles dumped in recycling banks and slot machines are turned back into new plastic bottles for consumer use, and also into polyester thread to make clothing – in fact, some Spanish fashion chains, like Ecoalf, and Spain's branches of Ikea, already use exclusively plastic waste fished from the sea for this purpose, and Ecoalf's nylon clothing is made, where they can find them, from discarded fishing nets dumped in the ocean.
Drinks cans can become consumer goods or fixtures – 80 Coca-Cola or Fanta cans can be turned into a bicycle wheel, eight aluminium food tins can become a lidded saucepan or 550 of them can become a bar chair.
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