Why is the return only to LIDL?

5 comments

1. Palpa, the company handling the bottle/can returns in Finland is a non-profit company owned by the major shop chains and breweries in Finland. Lidl’s bottles aren’t part of this system, probably because the German-owned family company doesn’t want to collaborate with anyone in Finland.

2. Lidl has its own recycling system for certain bottles like the one in this picture. So it’s only the Lidl’s own brands that this return policy concerns.

3. Because of this, I only do bottle returns to lidl. Then I don’t need to worry about this.

4. I think lidl got an exception when they came to Finland to make bottles that are not recycled the same way that all the regular plastic bottles. I think it has to do something with the plastic they use to make the bottles thinner and cheaper to produce. Im not sure if the bottles still need to be recycled seperetly because the bottles are not as thinn as they used to be. Could be that they are holding on to their special permission as a merketing tactic to force people to come back.

5. Because lidl’s bottles are a closed loop recycling system.

   “The entire recycling cycle is therefore contained in one carefully managed ecosystem. The Schwarz Group is the first in the market to implement all steps of this bottle-to-bottle recycling through its own closed-loop process.”

   [https://plasticseurope.org/case-studies/a-closed-loop-system-for-recycled-plastic-bottles-saves-materials-and-co2/](https://plasticseurope.org/case-studies/a-closed-loop-system-for-recycled-plastic-bottles-saves-materials-and-co2/)

   Otherwise the duopoly of K and S would need to sort through their bottles, find the lidl bottles and ship them back to lidl.