On a sunny, fall Sunday afternoon a few days ago, I sat with Taavi and Iita next to our bikes on Jyvaskyla’s harbor, working at my pear flavored cone. The pear was a conscious choice. In fact, I think for me, that’s why I agreed to ice cream when the kids asked. The day was cool; too cool generally perhaps to be out on bikes if you’re not from a northern climate, and specifically to be eating ice cream. The chill had been real overnight, but the sun’s rays this Sunday late morning was shaking the fall away from the day, promising something more glorious. Our ice cream stop was helping that glory along a bit, while confirming for me that pear flavored ice cream is indeed the most unexpected winner of the ice cream flavor game for me in recent years.
Taavi had tried it about a month ago while I went with something super predictable with chocolate and caramel in it. I’d tried Taavi’s cone and was marveling how tasty the pear was, when a relatively scruffy older gentleman pushing an old bike with a big metal basket on the front, broke my pear focus by coming up to the garbage can in front of us and deliberately sticking his arm down the public trash receptacle. Ew. No hand sanitizer either! I watched as he walked his bike down the park path, repeating the ritual at each trash receptacle every couple of hundred meters. He never came up with anything while in my line of sight.
Sunday while eating my own pear cone this time, an older lady came along, same as the guy a month ago, same can. She wasn’t out of a Chanel ad or anything, but she looked better dressed and “more respectable” than the guy a month ago, but down the garbage can her hand went. Only she came up with a beer can. She put it into a plastic bag she was carrying, and on she went down the line, same as the guy a month ago.
In 1952, Helsinki hosted the Summer Olympic Games and realized they needed to do something about the massive influx of empty Coca Cola bottles that came with the event. From that time on, Finland has had a bottle deposit system and today recycles 95% of its aluminum cans and makes it really easy to recycle plastic bottles.
To put that in parochial terms for ski-friends in Minnesota, Vermont, and Maine, Finland started recycling bottles the summer after George Hovland, John Burton, John Caldwell, and Chummy Broomhall came back from the Oslo Olympics. So, not that long ago.
A couple of things strike me about the depth and model of Finnish bottle and can recycling and the legacy of Coca Cola’s 1952 presence in Finland’s Olympic Games.
First, that Finland would recognize such a need to manage the bottle waste at that time feels remarkable. Perhaps any country who’d been under the thumb of two other neighboring powers for centuries might be acutely concerned about any effects all that glass might have being dumped on the land they cherish and now own themselves as a country. Those Olympics happened just 35 years after statehood.
I can’t say the bottle return stemmed from that line of thinking, but it would make sense as an attitude behind it. Regardless, the roots of that recognition are deep today; so deep, that Finland’s is considered the best and most efficient national bottle deposit and return system in the world.
Secondly, the system is a win-win for business and the environment. A purely capitalist take would be how oppressive the 51 cent/liter cost inflicted on drink manufacturers for bottle cost might hurt sales and profits, but manufacturers get federal tax breaks by enrolling in the system. The system actually has conditioned everyone involved with the cost of bottled drinks and how to get that cost back in ensuring nothing goes to the dump. While I’ve noticed that bottled drinks are a bit more expensive than at home, the bottle returns are convenient and are legitimate amounts of cash that pretty easily makes up the difference. Palpa, the company that facilitates the system for Finland is a €50M/year business.
Finally, the intersection of personal incentive, practicality, and infrastructure this far along is clear and makes the system work. We’ve had states do bottle and can returns in the US for decades with varying degrees of success, but it has only been as good as the infrastructure carrying it out. The infrastructure here is immense, universal, and the micro economic incentive is real. We put all of our bottles and cans in a plastic shopping bag in the closet. [An aside, shopping bags cost money here, they are high quality, don’t weaken nor puncture easily, are reusable for years, and are for sale at the beginning and end of every grocery checkout line, so that’s another story and system of re-use in itself. You can buy really nice bags like those blue ones at IKEA for like a Euro or two, or really high quality heavy duty plastic bags for about 20 cents each] When the bag is full, we bring it with us shopping.
At pretty much every supermarket and even some transportation hubs are machines in the wall to take your bottles from you and pay you for them. A touch screen can guide you but essentially you just start feeding bottles and cans into the mouth of the machine, and the machine leads you through the rest if you hit the right language flag (You’ll want to remember that you speak the language of the Union Jack, BTW. Old glory isn’t the icon for English here). When you’re done, the machine spits out a receipt that is redeemable for cash or against your grocery purchase at the cashier. Our typical receipt fluctuates between 2 and 5 Euros, and we drink relatively few bottled or canned drinks.
If you think about the older gentleman and lady in the harbor, if they were to spend a few hours every day, especially on weekends when drunkenness leads to laziness and cans and bottles get disregarded in drunken stupors, if you’re on a budget or unable to work, you can subsidize a low income pretty well just filling a bag full of bottles and cans and redeeming them. You could certainly pay for lunch without panhandling a single person. Which I’ve yet to have happen to me in ten years of visiting Finland. A connection?
While this all sounds well and good, we've noticed one big hole. Because the bottle return industry is so well established, it seems recycling non-bottle plastic has been largely overlooked in Finnish recycling. We have bins in our parking garage of our apartment complex for garbage, paper, glass, and metal, but not plastic (!!!). Our yogurt containers don’t work at the bottle stations. They have to go in the garbage unless we seek out center for non-bottle plastic recovery. Chalk one up for little cash incentive against a system established for just that--the yin and yang of social capitalism before our very eyes... It still feels very, very wrong to us. So there’s still something to be done. More and more modern apartment buildings are collecting non-bottle plastics, so that’s good. Ours just doesn’t. Yet.
Still, the percentage of bottle recycling is pretty stellar and efficient, and probably makes up for the non-bottle plastic refuse by comparison to most other places. I’m hoping they’ll close that gap even sooner.
My kids get the bottle money for candy day (yet another thing to elaborate on) so for Mimmu and me, the system incentivizes our kids much the same way it gets the older lady and gentleman at the harbor digging in the trash. We don’t have to take care of our empties. The kids are all over it, which we’re more than happy with, as long as they don’t decide to major in bottle and can collecting.
POST SCRIPT
A good friend shared this link on my Facebook post regarding this blog post. It is certainly a worthy read and fills in gaps in our perception of recycling plastic here in Finland and around the world. Besides it being infuriating, it is probably requisite that we all understand what's inside the article.
September 11, 20205:00 AM ET
LAURA SULLIVAN